[fab] [Fwd: What is the mkisofs license?]

[Tom Callaway]

On Mon, 2006-08-14 at 12:08 -0500, Tom Callaway wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-08-14 at 20:03 +0530, Rahul wrote:
> > Tom 'spot' Callaway wrote:
> > 
> > > 
> > >>> Then again, I've yet to see or hear any result from my previous license
> > >>> analysis, so I can only assume that Fedora doesn't care to clean up its
> > >>> existing egregious violations.
> > >>>
> > >> I do appreciate the work done and I was assuming that you were following 
> > >> up and working on dropping the violating packages.
> > > 
> > > I'm not able to drop packages in Core, I could start opening bugzilla
> > > tickets.
> > > 
> > 
> > Yes. Please do. How about Fedora Extras? I am sure we got to analyze 
> > them too.
> 
> We don't need to analyze Extras for FSF license compliance, IMHO.

Just to clarify:

I believe that the current rules regarding acceptable submissions for
Fedora Extras are sufficient:

The goal of The Fedora Project is to work with the Linux community to
build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from open
source software. In accordance with that, all packages included in
Fedora must be covered under an open source license. 

We clarify an open source license in three ways: 

      * OSI-approved license. You can find the list of OSI approved
        licenses here: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/ 
        
      * GPL-Compatible, Free Software Licenses. You can find the list
        here:
        http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses 
        
      * GPL-Incompatible, Free Software Licenses. You can find the list
        here:
        http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html#GPLIncompatibleLicenses 
        

If the license of a package isn't covered in one of those lists, urge
the upstream maintainer to seek OSI-approval for their license here:
http://www.opensource.org/docs/certification_mark.php#approval 

Alternately, if code is dual licensed, and one of the licenses meets the
open source license criteria, that code can be included in Fedora under
the open source license. 

--from http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Guidelines#Legal

Above and beyond that, I think there is value in ensuring that Fedora
Core only holds to FSF approved licenses (essentially, GPL-Compatible
and GPL-Incompatible Free Software Licenses), but that there is room in
Extras for packages which meet the OSI guidelines.


~spot