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

[Richard Fontana]

On Sat, 12 Dec 2009 20:29:57 -0800
Julius Davies <juliusdavies at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.]
> -----------

I haven't been following this thread closely, but this reference to
GPLv2 is a licensing bug - an erroneous holdover from the RHL era, and
should not have been included.  I can say categorically that any global
copyright license for the Fedora compilation is intended to have no
effect on the licensing of Fedora packages. 
 
- RF


-- 
Richard E. Fontana
Open Source Licensing and Patent Counsel
Red Hat, Inc.