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SPDX License Phase 1

Summary

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

Owner

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


Current status

  • Targeted release: Fedora Linux 38
  • Last updated: 2022-05-10
  • 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 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 move the old short names to the standard SPDX formula. 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 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:
    • Miroslav Suchý: license-fedora2spdx - done
    • Miroslav Suchý: allow license-validate to use spdx - TODO
    • David Cantrell: have good licenses in machine readable formate - done
    • David Cantrell: separate licenses from rpminspect-data-fedora BZ 2077914 - TODO
    • David Cantrell: generate from license data the wiki page similar to Licensing:Main
    • SOMEBODY: help maintainers who want to proactively change license string to SPDX indetifiers.
  • 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)

  • Policies and guidelines: Licensing page 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

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)

Release Notes

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