On 03.01.25 at 21:07 (UTC+0100), Morten Linderud wrote: > Yo, > > Today I noticed that the "License package sources" RFC contained an amended > 0BSD > license that added a two paragraph exception for patch files and other > auxiliary > files. The purpose of this change is to ensure the license is not covering > other > files in the repository that the author can't license from the upstream. > > See: https://rfc.archlinux.page/0040-license-package-sources/ > > While this is a practical problem that needs to be solved, we should not be > doing that through additional text in a FSF- and OSI approved license. This > essentially makes it a custom license that is not really going to detected as > 0BSD from external sources, and runs against the original goal of removing > legal > uncertainty. > > As the change, and by extension the problem itself, is not mentioned in the > text > it came as a surprise to me that it was done. > > What I think is more proper is to remove these two lines from the proposed > license file, and move this to a separate RFC that would cover a use of the > REUSE specification, or SPDX license identifiers. This would serve the same > purpose as the Debian `copyright` files, while also being standardized. > > I have written a proposed amendment to the text that I hope people find okay. > > https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/rfcs/-/merge_requests/49 > > > *Please note that any licenses already added to the repository needs to be > amended.* > > > My goal is to write up a RFC for the REUSE/SPDX part of this before the > current > 3 month timeline where we'll start adding licenses to ensure we don't prolong > the process. > > If people are curious how this would look like, I annotated the `usd` package > as > an example. > > https://gitlab.archlinux.org/foxboron/usd/-/tree/morten/reuse > > See the spec for more details: https://reuse.software/spec-3.2/ > > Cheers!
I think changing the license text in the RFC is ok. It does not change anything from the perspective of contributors as the same conditions apply to their contributions. I have one question about REUSE: does the specification allow wildcards, such as `path = ["*.patch"]`? It would be nice if we could set it up just once per project and not have to think about it when adding or removing patches. Cheers, Jakub
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