Changes/SPDX Licenses Phase 1

Comments and Explanations
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Guidance
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Change Proposal Name

Summary

Transition from Fedora's short name of licenses to standardized SPDX license formula.

Owner

• Name: Miroslav Suchý
• Name: Jilayne Lovejoy
• Name: Neal Gompa
• Name: David Cantrell

• Email: msuchy@redhat.com, dcantrell@redhat.com, jlovejoy@redhat.com, ngompa13@gmail.com

<your email address so we can contact you, invite you to meetings, etc. Please provide your Bugzilla email address if it is different from your email in FAS>

Current status

• Targeted release: Fedora Linux 38
• Last updated: 2022-04-26
• FESCo issue: <will be assigned by the Wrangler>
• Tracker bug: <will be assigned by the Wrangler>
• Release notes tracker: <will be assigned by the Wrangler>

Feedback

Ancient feedback from SPDX organization.

Summary from fedora-legal mailing list: we want this to happen, but this is big scope and likely will happen over more than one release.

Summary from devel-list: TBD

Benefit to Fedora

The use of a standardized identifier for license will align Fedora with other distributions. And allows efficient and reliable identification of licenses.

Scope

• Proposal owners:

• Other developers:

• Release engineering: #Releng issue number

• Policies and guidelines: N/A (not needed for this Change)

• Trademark approval: N/A (not needed for this Change)

• Alignment with Objectives:

Upgrade/compatibility impact

License strings are not used anything in run time. This change will not affect the upgrade or runtime of Fedora.

During the transition period, developer tools like rpminspect, licensecheck, etc. may produce false negatives. And we have to define a date where we flip these tools from old Fedora's short names to the SPDX formula.

How To Test

Users should not need any testing. These steps are for package maintainers:

• Fetch your license string from License tag in SPEC file.
• Test that your current Fedora's short name is correct. E.g.

   $ license-validate -v 'MIT or GPLv1'
   Approved license

• Convert license string to SPDX formula:

   $ license-fedora2spdx 'MIT or GPLv1'
   Warning: more options how to interpret MIT. Possible options: ['Adobe-Glyph', 'MIT-CMU', 'MIT-CMU', 'HPND', 'HPND', 'no-spdx-yet (MIT license (also X11))', 'SGI-B-2.0', 'SGI-B-2.0', 'SMLNJ', 'MIT-enna', 'MIT-feh', 'mpich2']
   mpich2 or GPL-1.0-only

In this example, the short name GPLv1 can be converted straight to GPL-1.0-only. But short name MIT stands for several licenses with different SPDX identifiers. You have to examine what license is package actually using. license-fedora2spdx will try to convert the formula and use one of the options but without any heuristics. You need to manually review the license.

User Experience

Users should be able to use standard software tools that audit licenses. E.g. for Software Bills of Materials.

Contingency Plan

• Contingency mechanism: (What to do? Who will do it?) N/A (not a System Wide Change)
• Contingency deadline: N/A (not a System Wide Change)
• Blocks release? N/A (not a System Wide Change), Yes/No

Documentation

N/A (not a System Wide Change)