Changes/SPDX Licenses Phase 1

SPDX License Phase 1

This is a proposed Change for Fedora Linux.
This document represents a proposed Change. As part of the Changes process, proposals are publicly announced in order to receive community feedback. This proposal will only be implemented if approved by the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee.

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
• Name: Richard Fontana
• Name: Matthew Miller

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

Current status

• Targeted release: Fedora Linux 38
• Last updated: 2022-05-17
• 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>

Detailed Description

In the past, Fedora decided to use short names for licenses. Although we documented the short names very well. The identifiers were never standard. In the meantime, SPDX identifiers become standard, and other SW vendors start using it.

In this phase, we want to provide documentation and tooling to allow maintainers to begin using SPDX license ids instead of the old Fedora short names. This move is opt-in. There will be Phase 2, where we identify the remaining packages and help them to migrate to the SPDX formula.

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 packaging-committee:

• [1]: older PR to change packaging guidelines
• [2]: present PR that needs more updating

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 (things sorted by done/todo and by priorities):
  • Miroslav Suchý: license-fedora2spdx - done
  • Jilayne Lovejoy: map rest of Fedora licenses to SPDX ids - done
  • David Cantrell: create machine-readable format and new repo - done
  • David Cantrell: merge mapping of Fedora licenses to SPDX ids to new data format/repo - done
  • Richard Fontana & Jilayne Lovejoy: review update all licensing info and legal pages in wiki - in process
  • Jilayne Lovejoy & Richard Fontana: create and populate new Docs pages for legal and licensing info - in process
  • Miroslav Suchy - create fedora-license-data package (with data from rpminspect-data-fedora) - TODO
  • David Cantrell: separate licenses from rpminspect-data-fedora BZ 2077914 - TODO
  • Miroslav Suchý: allow license-validate to use spdx - TODO
  • David Cantrell: generate from license data to new Docs page similar to Licensing:Main
  • SOMEBODY: create a webhook that updates Docs page after the merge to fedora-license-data - TODO
  • Jilayne Lovejoy: prepare PR for updates to packaging guidelines - in the process [3]
  • SOMEBODY: help maintainers who want to change license string to SPDX identifiers proactively.

• Out of Scope: In this phase, we do not target to move **all** packages to SPDX identifiers. That will be done in Phase 2. In Phase 2 we will identify the remaining packages and open BZ or PR.

• Other developers:

Early adopters can migrate their License tag to the SPDX identifiers. Proposal owners will gather feedback and will work on potential problems.

We want to have all bits ready so that maintainers can start changing the spec files just after Fedora 37 branching (summer 2022).

• Release engineering: #Releng issue number

• Policies and guidelines: Licensing page, packaging guidelines has to be altered.

• 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.

You can check if SPDX formula is correct using:

 $ license-validate -v --file FIXME "MIT-CMU or GPL-1.0-only"

User Experience

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

Dependencies

No other dependencies.

Contingency Plan

• Contingency mechanism: In this first phase, if something goes wrong, we can 'git revert' each change in dist-git. It is expected that in the first phase, there will be only a few packages altered. It may be a few hundred, but it is still doable to revert.
• Contingency deadline: Beta freeze. But it is expected that not all packages will be converted by that time and the change will continue in the next release.
• Blocks release? No. This change has no impact on runtime of any package.

Documentation

N/A (not a System Wide Change)