Licenses

This document describes the licensing mechanism used by openRuyi.

License Texts

If the source package includes the full text of its license in a separate file, the packager must include that file (that is, the file containing the package’s license text) in the %files list and mark it with the %license directive.

Note that the paths packagers mark in this way may be either relative or absolute. For relative paths, RPM automatically copies them from the source tree into a subdirectory of %_defaultlicensedir (/usr/share/licenses). For absolute paths, RPM simply marks the file as a license file in the final package.

Packagers can also mark license files in a programmatically generated file list that they then include via %files -f. In such cases, macros often perform the marking automatically, and the packager may not see it directly. When a user runs rpm -q --licensefiles, RPM displays all license files included in the package.

Subpackages

If a subpackage depends, either implicitly or explicitly, on a base package (where we define the base package as a final binary package that the build process produces from the same source RPM, which contains the appropriate license text that the packager marks as %license), then that subpackage does not need to include the same license text again as %license.

However, if a subpackage is independent of any base package (that is, it does not depend on the base package, either implicitly or explicitly), it must include a copy of any applicable license text for the files that the subpackage contains, provided that such license text exists in the source.

The License tag

Every spec file must contain a License tag, and the packager must make every reasonable effort to ensure that it is accurate.

Packagers must write the License tag using the appropriate SPDX License Expressions or SPDX expression.

Basic Rule

Unless a package produces multiple binary subpackages and the packager chooses to specify them separately, the expression in the License tag should enumerate all licenses present in the package source code. This rule excludes licenses that apply only to source code material that the build process does not copy into the binary RPM, whether verbatim or in transformed form (for example, through compilation).

Simple Case

The MIT license entirely covers the source code for the wayland-utils package. Its License tag is:

License:        MIT

A More Complex Case

The plasmatube package contains executable code that the compiler builds primarily from source files using the GPL-3.0-or-later license, although one compiled source file uses the GPL-2.0-or-later license. It also includes an appdata.xml file that declares the CC0-1.0 license (assuming copyright applies to this file) and an SVG file that uses the CC-BY-SA-4.0 license. Its License tag is therefore:

License:        GPL-3.0-or-later AND GPL-2.0-or-later AND CC0-1.0 AND CC-BY-SA-4.0

Source Files Not Included in the Binary RPM

Packagers must exclude from the License tag any licenses that apply only to files in the source package that the build process does not copy into the binary RPM. Consider the xmodmap package:

The xmodmap binary RPM ships an executable and a man page derived from files in the xmodmap source code, which use the MIT and MIT-open-group licenses. However, the source tarball in the xmodmap SRPM also contains many Automake, Autoconf, and other build-related files that various other licenses partially cover. Since the build process copies none of those files into the binary RPM, packagers must not include the corresponding licenses in the License tag. Therefore, the License tag is:

License:        MIT AND MIT-open-group

Special Rule for Perl Module Packages

Many Perl modules state that they use the same licensing terms as Perl 5. The authors distribute Perl 5 itself under a dual license, which packagers can express in SPDX form as: GPL-1.0-or-later OR Artistic-1.0-Perl.

Public Domain

For software packages in the public domain, if the upstream code merely states “This code is in the public domain” without using a formal legal instrument such as CC0, the packager may write the License tag as:

License:        LicenseRef-openRuyi-Public-Domain

If the upstream project explicitly uses Creative Commons Zero (CC0) to dedicate its work to the public domain, then the packager should use the official SPDX identifier in the License tag:

License:        CC0-1.0

If the author explicitly uses the Unlicense template, then the packager should write the License tag as:

License:        Unlicense