Licenses: being finicky

[Peter Hutterer]

On Wed, Feb 14, 2024 at 09:37:43PM +0100, tlaronde at kergis.com wrote:
> Some meson.build, for example, have a SPDX-License-Identifier: tag,
> where "MIT" is mentionned, applying (I think) to the file itself, and
> the project has an entry with a pair (license: 'MIT') applying to the
> data by itself.
> 
> But, for example, xcbproto has a license with a (classical, for me)
> fourth clause forbiding use of the names of the authors without
> permission to advertise etc.
> 
> Acoording to:
> 
> https://spdx.org/licenses/
> 
> this is identified as "X11", the "MIT" being the same without this
> fourth paragraph. (I suspect this distinction is rather new.)
> 
> When creating meson files for building, is there some rule regarding
> this? 
> 
> I think that the correct way is to state 'X11' or 'MIT' or
> whatever matches COPYING or COPYRIGHTS or whatever file explains the
> license status and to conform, simply because this exists and is
> standardized, to the SPDX list of identifiers.
> 
> What do other think about this?

we've recently done this work for Fedora so you can probably get the
various licenses from there. Fun fact, some projects have *a lot* of
SPDX identifers (i think the record is 15).

In the end whether the license entry in meson.build matters is very
questionable and only the actual code files and maybe COPYING matters
(but do ask your preferred lawyer for confirmation).

Licenses are also compatible or direct derivatives of each other so X11
and MIT are compatible and unless you're into lawyerese it doesn't
matter which one is listed in meson.build.

> Note: I'm not planing to review "correct" attribution between X11 and
> MIT in all the Xorg projects---I'm sufficiently late on my schedule
> with what I have to do without starting to rover around. Furthermore,
> X11 has been historically identified as 'MIT'...

The main question: what are you're trying to achieve here? The
vast majority of our projects are old and new projects tend to
(or should) copy/paste from SDPX anyway.

Cheers,
  Peter

PS: If I were you I'd be *really* careful trying to update old
repositories. We've made people maintainers for less! ;)