Commas not allowed in License tags
Kevin Kofler
kevin.kofler at chello.at
Tue Sep 1 13:42:21 UTC 2009
Hi,
this has recently come up in a discussion about the License tags of gcc and
mingw32-gcc. The guidelines are very clear here:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:LicensingGuidelines#Multiple_Licensing_Scenarios
> If your package contains files which are under multiple, distinct, and
> independent licenses, then the spec must reflect this by using "and" as a
> separator.
There's even an example to clarify this:
> License: Python and LGPLv2+ and BSD
This is also reflected in the FAQ:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing:FAQ#How_should_I_handle_multiple_licensing_situations.3F
It shall be noted that commas are also not allowed in dual-licensing
scenarios, where "or" is the required separator.
Thus the following License tag is NOT valid:
> License: GPLv3+, GPLv3+ with exceptions and GPLv2+ with exceptions
It should be fixed to read:
License: GPLv3+ and GPLv3+ with exceptions and GPLv2+ with exceptions
The goal here is not to write stylistically nice English, but to write 100%
unambiguous, automatically parsable text. The rpmlint tool is correct in
complaining about this.
Kevin Kofler
More information about the fedora-devel-list
mailing list