NOTE: Please publicize any license changes to your packages

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Sun, 2007-07-22 at 21:53 -0800, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> On 7/22/07, Thorsten Leemhuis <fedora at leemhuis.info> wrote:
> > But what I'd like to see added at the same time are some automatic check
> > to make sure properly done license changes get noticed automatically. A
> > basic "sha1sum the LICENSE file from upstream (most ship one) once and
> > put a small script into the %pre section that compares the know sha1sum
> > with the current one from the tarball and aborts if something changed"
> > should find properly done license changes automatically and keeps load
> > off the maintainer.
> 
> That's actually a pretty good idea i think.  For a lot of packages...
> packages that can easily define a set of license/copying files...
... __can__ ... the critical cases are those which don't.

> this
> sort of automatic file checking would help flag problems.
In trivial cases such as the GPLv3 change, it could help.

In cases of packages changing from FOO-license v1.283 to BAR-license
v32.100 it doesn't. In cases of packages pointing to web-sites, it
doesn't ... etc. If you try to track these you'll end up with 100s of
different license tags - This would require the often mentioned
bureaucracy.

>   Granted its
> not going to work for all packages, but it might help a lot in the
> specific case of entire project codebases transitioning to gpl3 from a
> previous license.
If you think so, I disagree. You are driving away contributors from
fedora, by imposing more and more bureaucracy. If  you really want this
YOU (Jef Spaleta in person) will have to do it yourselves.

Ralf