I have a doubt about the "free for non commercial use" license. Let's say a software licensed under a Fedora good license uses data from a catalog (directly or indirectly - e.g. to create a custom catalog format) that is licensed "free for non commercial use".
A good example for astronomy programs would be the NGC catalog from http://www.klima-luft.de/steinicke/ngcic/ngcic_e.htm
or, in my actual case, https://github.com/dstndstn/astrometry.net/blob/master/catalogs/ngc2000-read...
I'm now packaging "astrometry" for Fedora and I actually removed that catalog from sources. What's the limit of the "free for non commercial use" statement? In this case can the catalog be maintained in sources? If the software is under a free license there's no "commercial use" involved, in my opinion.
Thanks
Mattia
On 03/20/2016 06:47 AM, Mattia Verga wrote:
I'm now packaging "astrometry" for Fedora and I actually removed that catalog from sources. What's the limit of the "free for non commercial use" statement? In this case can the catalog be maintained in sources? If the software is under a free license there's no "commercial use" involved, in my opinion.
Any license with a commercial use restriction is non-free. Material under such a license must not be distributed in Fedora, either in source or binary RPM.
The fact that Red Hat/Fedora does not charge for Fedora distribution is not relevant to this point, for two main reasons: * It is possible that any Fedora package may end up in RHEL, which Red Hat does sell. * It is possible that anyone else may choose to sell Fedora (or build derivative works off Fedora and then sell that). We do not wish to limit their ability to do this.
~tom
== Red Hat