#76 Clarify license of CentOS specfiles
Closed 2 years ago by jcpunk. Opened 2 years ago by dcavalca.

Moving this to an issue for better visibility from the -private list discussion. It's not entirely clear which license the CentOS specfiles are under, and we likely need clarification from Red Hat legal. We do know the Fedora specfiles are under MIT per https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing:Main#License_of_Fedora_SPEC_Files and I would naively assume the CentOS ones would follow the same, but this should be clarified and formalized somewhere (or, if it already is, we should bubble that up).

@bex, can you ask Red Hat legal for help here?

Making this issue private for now because legal, though I don't think there's anything here that's particularly confidential.


I'd like to politely ask @shaunm to pursue this with my assistance as needed.

Metadata Update from @dcavalca:
- Issue private status set to: False (was: True)

2 years ago

Flipping this to public after today's board meeting discussion

After reading some stuff and talking to a few (non-lawyer) people, I'm pretty convinced that the spec files inherit the license from Fedora, which defaults to MIT, unless otherwise specified:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal:Fedora_Project_Contributor_Agreement

A Fedora contributor could choose a different license for a spec file they contribute. And Red Hat or a CentOS contributor could choose to put a more restrictive license on a derived spec file. I don't know that this ever happens, and it's not clear to me where it would be recorded if it ever did happen.

I can escalate to Red Hat Legal if we want. But I think this might boil down to knowledge of how licenses are specified in our systems, rather than how licenses work.

Metadata Update from @jcpunk:
- Issue status updated to: Closed (was: Open)

2 years ago

Board agreement with Shaun's post above.

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