The ebuilds for fping in the Portage tree have the license set to "fping." However, commit db7b97cd[0] changes the license listed by their project from "MIT" to "BSD with advertising." Seeing as this commit was made on 2016-09-14, it should be safe to assume that releases thereafter can have the ebuild use "BSD-4" for the license. Currently 4.0 is the only version in the tree that would be affected by this change. [0]: https://github.com/schweikert/fping/commit/db7b97cd466d4a264e26f396712eef883bbc5af4 Reproducible: Always
You mean we should prefer not what COPYING in the top directory says, but what contrib/fping.spec says? I am not so sure.
(In reply to Jeroen Roovers from comment #1) > You mean we should prefer not what COPYING in the top directory says, but > what contrib/fping.spec says? I am not so sure. Correction: You say we should prefer reading contrib/fping.spec over what *every source file* says in its header?
<Licenses team> The package is released under a very old variant of the BSD license that was used with 4.3BSD-Tahoe in 1988. See for example: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing:BSD#BSD_Three_Clause_Variant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses#Previous_license This is neither identical to BSD-4 nor to the 3-clause "new" BSD license (even if Fedora has confusingly named it so). Also it is not a free software license, because it doesn't grant the right to distribute modified versions. (In reply to sluidfoe from comment #0) > The ebuilds for fping in the Portage tree have the license set to "fping." Which is accurate, as it corresponds to the license of the source files in the tarball. Furthermore, they haven't changed the license terms in their git repo after the 4.0 release. > However, commit db7b97cd[0] changes the license listed by their project from > "MIT" to "BSD with advertising." I see this as an attempt to match the License tag in the RPM spec file with the contents of the COPYING file, and IMHO they got it wrong. Could you file a bug upstream, please? </Licenses team>
Maybe they intended to license RPM builds as "BSD with advertising"? I fail to spot an upstream bug report at <https://github.com/schweikert/fping/issues> yet.
(In reply to Jeroen Roovers from comment #4) Reported upstream: https://github.com/schweikert/fping/issues/192 I don't see any issues with the ebuild, so I'd suggest closing this as UPSTREAM.
Upstream have updated the license in fping.spec: https://github.com/schweikert/fping/commit/5916abe06986b6b1fa3a5cfc1da4066c3b5270ba
