License Approval

In order to meet the goal of creating a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from free and open source software, all software and other content made available by Fedora must be under licenses determined to be allowed in Fedora, with only limited, conditional exceptions.

Fedora applies different license approval criteria for different categories of material:

The corresponding status names for approved licenses are:

The strictest license approval standards apply to code, while somewhat relaxed standards apply to the other categories. Licenses that are not allowed for any category are classified as not-allowed.

The Fedora legal documentation includes lists of allowed and not-allowed licenses for Fedora. These lists are generated from the data maintained in the Fedora License Data repository. In case of any discrepancy between the license lists and the data in Fedora License Data, the latter is considered authoritative. For some purposes you may find it more useful to refer to the repository rather than the generated lists.

If a license that covers something in Fedora, or in a package that has been or is intended to be proposed for inclusion in Fedora Linux, is not listed on the allowed and not-allowed lists, then it must be reviewed. Please follow the license review process.

Whether a license is allowed or not allowed for Fedora is ultimately determined by the Fedora Council. Today, this decision is normally delegated to members of the Red Hat legal team who are specialists in free software / open source licensing and who are very familiar with and supportive of Fedora’s mission and foundations.

A license is allowed if Fedora determines that the license is a free software / open source license. At a high level, the inquiry involves determining whether the license provides software freedom, and (equivalently) making sure that the license does not place burdens on users' exercise of its permissions that are inconsistent with evolving community norms and traditions around what is acceptable in a free software / open source license. See below for some background on Fedora licensing policy.

As a general rule, all code made available by Fedora must be governed by an allowed license. A license that is in the general allowed category can be used for anything in Fedora, not just code.

Fedora will designate a license as allowed for documentation (allowed-documentation) if it meets the criteria for allowed licenses and it seems to be specifically designed for documentation.

In addition, Fedora classifies the following licenses as allowed-documentation (even though they do not meet the above criteria):

For purposes of Fedora license classification, “content” means any material that is not code, documentation, fonts or firmware. Here are some examples of content:

Fedora will designate a license as allowed for content (allowed-content) if it meets the criteria for allowed licenses with the following exceptions:

Fedora may designate a license as allowed for fonts (allowed-fonts) if it meets the criteria for allowed licenses with the following exception:

A good example of what we mean by a "nominal prohibition on resale or distribution in isolation" is found in the following condition in the SIL Open Font License 1.1:

Neither the Font Software nor any of its individual components, in Original or Modified Versions, may be sold by itself.

This prohibition would not be acceptable in a license applicable to code.

Some applications, drivers, and hardware require binary firmware images to boot Fedora Linux or function properly. Fedora permits inclusion of these files as long as they meet the following license and technical requirements:

Any license that does not meet the criteria above for allowed licenses (including allowed for a specific category) will be classified as not-allowed.

Fedora uses a subset of SPDX expressions to represent allowed and not-allowed licenses in TOML files in the Fedora License Data data/ directory and in the generated Fedora license lists. Currently, these expressions are one of the following:

The names of the TOML files in Fedora License Data are based on the associated SPDX expressions. Internal whitespace in the expression is represented by an underscore in the file name. (Examples: MIT.toml, Apache-2.0_WITH_LLVM-exception.toml, LicenseRef-Bacula.toml.)

Each SPDX expression in Fedora License Data signifies one or more actual license texts that match the elements of the expression. In general, Fedora adopts the the SPDX definition of "match" as contained in the SPDX Matching Guidelines for purposes of determining whether a given license, as found in a package, maps to a given SPDX expression defined in a TOML file in Fedora License Data.

Fedora aims for stability in its license classifications, but its treatment of a particular license or license type may change as community standards and expectations around acceptable licensing evolve or as new issues and concerns come to light. In rare cases, an allowed license may be reclassified as not-allowed (or an allowed license may be reclassified as allowed only for a specific category of material, as when CC0-1.0 was reclassified from allowed to allowed-content). When this sort of reclassification is done, we will try to minimize disruption, including by defining appropriate usage exceptions.

Over several decades, norms concerning acceptable standards for software (and other content) licensing developed out of communities associated with free software and open source projects. Fedora builds upon and contributes to the development of this community tradition. Most of the philosophical and practical groundwork for Fedora’s policies on licensing was developed over many years by Tom 'spot' Callaway, often working in collaboration with members of Red Hat’s legal team.

The two most influential efforts to distill FOSS licensing norms are the Free Software Foundation’s maintenance and interpretation of the Free Software Definition, and the Open Source Initiative’s maintenance and interpretation of the Open Source Definition. For much of its earlier history, Fedora tended to regard the FSF’s interpretation as highly authoritative, while viewing the OSI’s license review decisions with greater skepticism. However, even at the high point of that period of skepticism, Fedora treated the OSD and OSI decisions as one source of persuasive authority. Fedora has also sometimes taken into account the decisions of other major community Linux distributions and other important community efforts to define and apply software freedom-related legal norms. Fedora’s license approval decisions are both principled and pragmatic.

Out of necessity, Fedora has passed judgment on hundreds of licenses never considered by the FSF or the OSI. In a small number of cases, Fedora has disagreed with decisions of the FSF and OSI regarding whether particular licenses are FOSS. Over time, Fedora has built up an informal body of interpretation and policymaking regarding free/open licensing which has itself influenced the larger FOSS community outside of Fedora.