[Fedora-legal-list] Please define "effective license" (for the love of consistency)

[Julius Davies]

Hi,

Maybe the overall "master" copyright license for the Fedora
compilation causes every single GPL+ compatible file inside Fedora to
be licensed as GPL+ ?  So every LGPL, BSD, MIT file which *can* be
relicensed in this way *is" even if such a relicensing is unnecessary
for license compliance?  Take a look at this file on your Fedora
CDROM:

ftp://ftp.nrc.ca/pub/systems/linux/redhat/fedora/linux/releases/12/Everything/i386/os/GPL
-----------
*****************************************************************************
The following copyright applies to the Fedora compilation and any
portions of Fedora it does not conflict with. Whenever this
policy does conflict with the copyright of any individual portion of Fedora,
it does not apply.

*****************************************************************************
		    GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
		       Version 2, June 1991

[Rest of file is verbatim copy of GPLv2 license.]
-----------


Notice I'm saying GPL+ and not GPLv2+ because of information on the
"Licensing:FAQ - FedoraProject" wiki page:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing/FAQ

-----------
If neither the source, nor the upstream composed documentation says
anything about the license version, then it could be under _ANY_
version of the GPL. The version listed in COPYING is irrelevant from
this perspective. Technically it could be under any license, but if
all we have to go by is COPYING, we'll use COPYING to imply that it is
under the GPL, all versions (GPL+).
-----------



yours,

Julius



On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 8:43 PM, Orcan Ogetbil <oget.fedora at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 9:03 PM, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
>> On 12/12/2009 07:24 AM, Orcan Ogetbil wrote:
>>> On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 5:25 AM, Michael Schwendt  wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Fedora's Licensing Guidelines don't use the term "effective license"
>>>> anywhere. Not even in the section on dual licensing, which is the scenario
>>>> where the packager may choose to pick either license for the whole
>>>> program.
>>>>
>>>> There is no such thing as an "effective license" related to the Mixed
>>>> Source Licensing Scenario [1], because re-licensing a program, such as
>>>> converting from LGPL to GPL, is not done implicitly or automatically.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Thanks but that doesn't answer my question. Are so many people just
>>> imagining things? Why does this inconsistency exist? I'd like to have
>>> this cleared up so we won't have to discuss the same issue over and
>>> over again.
>>
>> People are just confused. The issue has already been clarified. Is there
>> still some specific confusion?
>
> Okay. Whenever someone says "most restrictive license wins" again, I
> will say "no", and will refer to this thread.
>
> Thanks,
> Orcan
>
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-- 
yours,

Julius Davies
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