When porting sil-mingzat-fonts package the the current packaging standard which uses macros from fonts-rpm-macros-2.0.5-7.fc36.noarch, I found that the generated RPM License is not sufficient. The font binary RPM package has: License : OFL because of in the spec file, %global fontlicense OFL but the generated file /usr/share/metainfo/org.fedoraproject.sil-mingzat-fonts.metainfo.xml reads: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!-- SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT --> <component type="font"> <id>org.fedoraproject.sil-mingzat-fonts</id> <metadata_license>MIT</metadata_license> <project_license>OFL</project_license> Therefore an expected License tag is "OFL and MIT". I cannot work around with "%global fontlicense OFL and MIT" because that would store a wrong license into project_license element. I think fonts-rpm-macros needs a correction.
There is no correct or wrong way decided. During the RHEL9 development I discussed this similar query to internal legal team as well but i did not get final answer. There are many scenarios to look at this same issue of listing licenses from source code in package license tag. I think its upto package maintainer to decide whether to add metadata license in package license tag or not. Now i suppose here that you want to keep license for sil-mingzat-fonts package as "OFL and MIT" and not just "OFL". Okay then either I or someone will check the macros implementation and will see what need to be fixed. I will also look forward to packaging-committee to decide on this as it will be fonts guidelines change or better say all types of packaging guidelines license tag issue. I am sure there can be many packages in Fedora which do not include metadata license to its package license tag. Also, remember this new fonts guidelines were written and implemented by Nicolas Mailhot only and I guess he is not around or not contributing to Fedora project currently.
Given that all the licenses for all the files in the package should be added to License tag, this issue looks like a bug in fonts-rpm-macros because License tag and metainfo file is genereated by it and metadata_license tag is hardcoded in their macro. we should fix fonts-rpm-macros to add correct license to License tag.
Thanks for looking into it. That's what I want.
Reported https://pagure.io/packaging-committee/issue/1179 now let's wait till FPC decides on this.
This bug appears to have been reported against 'rawhide' during the Fedora Linux 37 development cycle. Changing version to 37.
This bug appears to have been reported against 'rawhide' during the Fedora Linux 39 development cycle. Changing version to 39.
Can we ask Fedora Legal, please? Personally I am opposed to this - I feel it is ridiculous to add MIT to every font package just because it includes generated appstream data. I would much prefer to see an exception to this granted.
Feel free to ask Fedora legal. Another acceptable resolution for me is fixing the tool which generates the metainfo.xml files not to add the SPDX-License-Identifier comment. That's based on the fact that a copyright is only acknowledged to creative works of humans. Machine generated output, like this one, isn't it. If there should be a license covering metainfo.xml, it has to be a license of an input passed into the generator. And that's obviously a license of the font file and a license of the identifiers the tool supplies.