Fedora Legal Resources

This documentation covers various Fedora policies, guidelines and other information pertaining to licensing and other legal issues.

Fedora Licensing Policies

This documentation explains what kinds of licenses are allowed in Fedora, provides lists of allowed and not-allowed licenses, describes the process for reviewing new licenses, and explains how to populate spec file License tags.

Fedora has a legal mailing list (legal@lists.fedoraproject.org). Only list subscribers can post directly to the list. You can subscribe to the list and view the archives at https://lists.fedoraproject.org/admin/lists/legal.lists.fedoraproject.org/.

If you have a question about whether a specific license is allowed for Fedora, it is usually preferable to submit an issue at the Fedora License Data project rather than ask about it on the legal list.
If you have a legal question relating to a specific Fedora package (other than the allowability of a particular license), it is usually preferable to raise the question in a Bugzilla ticket rather than ask about it on the legal list.

FE-Legal is a Bugzilla tracker bug. If a package review ticket is blocked by FE-Legal, this means that the person who set the block believes that the package raises an issue under Fedora licensing guidelines or other aspects of Fedora’s legal policies.

Package reviews blocked by FE-Legal cannot be approved until the block is officially lifted.

Legacy note regarding fedora.info

Cornell University and the University of Virginia offer an open source digital object repository software under the mark FEDORA Project. Red Hat’s Fedora Project is not affiliated, connected or associated with the FEDORA Project of Cornell University and the University of Virginia. Cornell University and the University of Virginia do not sponsor, approve of, or endorse Red Hat’s Fedora Project.