On 03.01.25 21:07, 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!
As per the discussion on IRC, I think this suggestion makes sense. I agree that the custom 0BSD change should have been called out in the RFC. I'm ok with changing the RFC text since it's kind of an implementation detail to make sure we are in line with the original intent of the RFC. However, we need to make sure people are on-board with this as not a trivial RFC change and I don't think we've done this before. Thanks for doing the mockup on usd, really helps to visualize how this would look.