legal January 2019

legal@lists.fedoraproject.org

8 participants
5 discussions

transgrp license
by Jerry James 14 Feb '19

14 Feb '19

For many years now, the gap package has bundled 3 sets of data files describing mathematical structures (groups). I am working on updating the Fedora package to the latest release, version 4.10.0. In this version, those 3 sets of data files have been split out into separately distributed entities, with their own home pages and release schedules. They all grew new license terms, too. I am worried about the license on one of them, transgrp (see https://www.gap-system.org/Packages/transgrp.html). It reads: This library containing data and access functions, its parts are licensed in different ways. - In the belief that mathematical truth is universal and not owned or licenseable, the mathematical content can only be acknowledged: Groups of degree up to 15 are as described in Conway/Hulpke/McKay (LMS. Journal Comp. Math, Vol 1.) and the sources quoted therein. Groups of degree up to 30 were determined by Hulpke (J.Symb.Comp). Groups of degree 32 were determined by Cannon and Holt (Exp.Math.). Groups of degree 33-47 were determined by Holt. - The actual way of storing the groups and associated data, and the arrangement of the groups, is licensed under the artistic license 2.0: https://opensource.org/licenses/Artistic-2.0 If you distribute software that claims to use or include the GAP transitive groups library it must include the actual data lists verbatim. - The functions accessing the data files are licensed under GPL2 and under GPL3. I would call this license "Artistic 2.0 and (GPLv2 or GPLv3)", except that I am worried about the sentence that begins "If you distribute software...". That sentence refers to the data files. There is no code in them, just formal descriptions of mathematical structures. Is that sentence a problem? Thank you, -- Jerry James http://www.jamezone.org/

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Re: Can we please stop enforcing Signed-off-by commits?
by Miro Hrončok 21 Jan '19

21 Jan '19

On 17. 01. 19 12:59, Randy Barlow wrote: > On Thu, 2019-01-17 at 11:13 +0100, Miro Hrončok wrote: >> Why do Fedora upstreams enforce this? > > I enforce the DCO in Bodhi. I started doing it after attended a talk by > Richard Fontana where he suggested it as a way to be explicit about the > license of contributions (i.e., not just the license of the project). > My memory is now a bit hazy, but I think there was some discussion > about how many projects work under the assumption that the license of > contributions is equal to the license of the project (sometimes stated > as "license in, license out", but that most do not make this explicit. > The DCO explicitly states that the contribution itself is granted to > the project under the same license that the project uses. I'd be very interested to know how adding some random line to a commit message grants an explicit license according to something that is not even linked from the commit message :( CCing legal. -- Miro Hrončok -- Phone: +420777974800 IRC: mhroncok

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Mbrola voice files
by Tomáš Korbař 16 Jan '19

16 Jan '19

Hi, I'm currently packaging Mbrola speech synthetizer for Fedora and we ran into an issue. Is it legal to package Mbrola voice files which have this https://github.com/numediart/MBROLA-voices/blob/master/LICENSE.md license? If it is not, then is it legal to ask user if he/she wants to download them and with his/her consent install them? And then is it even allowed to package program into Fedora which is not useful without non-free files? Thanks for any help.

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Server Side Public License (SSPL) v1
by Tom Callaway 15 Jan '19

15 Jan '19

After review, Fedora has determined that the Server Side Public License v1 (SSPL) is not a Free Software License. It is the belief of Fedora that the SSPL is intentionally crafted to be aggressively discriminatory towards a specific class of users. Additionally, it seems clear that the intent of the license author is to cause Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt towards commercial users of software under that license. To consider the SSPL to be "Free" or "Open Source" causes that shadow to be cast across all other licenses in the FOSS ecosystem, even though none of them carry that risk. It is also worth nothing that while there is a draft for a "v2" of the SSPL: A) It is not final. B) It is not in use anywhere at this time (as far as we know). C) The intent of the v2 draft text is not changed from the v1 license currently in use. We have updated our "Bad License" list to include SSPLv1. No software under that license may be included in Fedora (including EPEL and COPRs). Thanks, Tom Callaway Fedora Legal

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Decompilers allowed
by jiri vanek 03 Jan '19

03 Jan '19

Hello! I recall decompilers were forbidden to be packed some long time ago, and in meantime this ban was lifted. Before packing few java decompilers (https://bitbucket.org/mstrobel/procyon/ and https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community/tree/master/plugins/java-de…) I wish to verify allowness of decompilers. Thank you for confirmation J.

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legal January 2019