On Wed, Feb 22, 2023 at 2:52 PM <h-k-81(a)hotmail.com> wrote:
Hello
During a package review [1], the question arose whether the package
under review had an acceptable license [2].
Looking at the git log I can see the following commits were done to the
COPYRIGHT file:
```
commit d7c9ecae0492bbdd449fd8e3ccf94abf73ea5f36
Author: Kornel Lesiński <kornel(a)geekhood.net>
Date: Sat Dec 5 14:46:48 2015 +0000
Relicense under GPL
...
...
commit 3fe4b3520e0502d0a2822d6d19ef8374960c0a3c
Author: Kornel Lesiński <kornel(a)geekhood.net>
Date: Sun Mar 2 19:18:51 2014 +0000
Changed license to the simplified BSD license
```
It seems that the license changed two times in the past. I'm not sure
what that would mean and if it's okay, as I have little experience with
open source licenses.
Based on the quickest glance, I wonder whether the current maintainer
has adequately preserved any third-party license notices from the
"simplified BSD" period (which I guess predates the Rust version), but
we normally wouldn't do that level of research based on pure
speculation. There's nothing inherently problematic about a
BSD-licensed project relicensing to GPLv3.
FYI: The package that I am trying to get into fedora is a rewrite of
a C
library [3] that is already packaged for fedora. So this should mean
that the license is acceptable, right?
Not necessarily, since it is possible for licensing problems in
previously-included packages to have been overlooked, or to have been
dealt with in ways that may not satisfy present-day Fedora standards.
But I don't see anything here that suggests there is any problem.
Richard