Hi manganeese,
1. What should be put as the license for projects that have a license
similar to a SPDX license, but doesn't match any?
* One example of this would be allwpilib[1], which has a license
very similar to the BSD 3-clause license, but since it has the word
"NONINFRINGEMENT" after "MERCHANTABILITY", it doesn't match as the BSD
3-clause license (if I am reading the SPDX matching guidelines correctly)
The allwpilib example is a custom license. According to the wiki [1],
one would declare this as e.g.
`LicenseRef-BSD-3.0-Clause-Noninfringement` and place the custom license
into the `LICENSES/` subdirectory as described in RFC 0052. [2]
2. I have a PKGBUILD that I made for allwpilib, and I needed to create a
patch to allow it to build with -O2 instead of -O3. Should this patch be
licensed under 0BSD, or the aforementioned modified BSD 3-clause license?
I keep encountering this very dilemma in my own AUR PKGBUILDs. As far as
I can tell, the RFC doesn’t cover this case [2]. (It does, however,
cover the case of patches copied from upstream.)
I noticed that the `reuse` CLI tool (around which the RFC was designed)
and Arch’s `pkgctl` CLI wrapper have an opinionated default behavior
around this. I.e., if you run `pkgctl license setup` on a PKGBUILD
repository and it includes a patch, then the tool assigns it the
upstream license automatically, even if you wrote the patch yourself.
IANAL but I think that this default behavior is quite reasonable
approach (even though a little conservative.) Reasonable because even if
you wrote the patch yourself, the surrounding-lines context may still
contain copyrighted code from upstream and I think we need to comply
with that.
Out of an abundance of caution, what I keep doing is leave it as the
tool suggests (i.e. release the patch under the upstream license).
Additionally, I put *both* `Arch Linux Contributors` (because I authored
the patch) *and* the upstream author of the surrounding context into the
`SPDX-FileCopyrightText` (example: [3]).
This method is erring pretty much on the side of caution but I’d love to
learn how others feel about this.
Regards
Claudia
[1]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PKGBUILD#license
[2]: https://rfc.archlinux.page/0052-reuse/
[3]:
https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/REUSE.toml?h=en-croissant#n32
