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 Feodora 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 strictest standards apply to code (corresponding to the general allowed status), while somewhat relaxed standards apply to other categories: documentation, content, fonts, and firmware.

The Fedora legal documentation includes lists of allowed and not-allowed licenses for Fedora. Those lists are generated from the data maintained in the Fedora License Data repository.

If a license is listed in the allowed list, then it is allowed in Fedora for the relevant category, i.e., allowed (for all categories), allowed for fonts, etc.) as described below.

If a license is listed in the not-allowed list, then it has already been reviewed and determined to be not-allowed in Fedora. In some cases, an exception to the designation of not-allowed has been recorded in the "usage" field shown in the not-allowed list and the corresponding TOML file. If you think Fedora should make an exception to the designation of a license as not-allowed (for example, a time-limited or package-specific tolerance of the license), you can raise this in an issue in (preferably) the Fedora License Data repository or on the Fedora legal mailing list.

If a license that covers something in Fedora, or in a package that has been 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.

Fedora has a uniform set of licensing standards that apply not only to Fedora Linux packages but also to material that is not part of a Fedora Linux package but has been created or built for Fedora by Fedora contributors. One example is this Fedora legal documentation. Another example is Copr repositories. In this documentation we sometimes refer specifically to "Fedora Linux" but context may make clear that we intend to cover non-packaged Fedora material as well.

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 more on the history of Fedora licensing policy.

A license that is allowed can be used for anything in Fedora, not just code.

Fedora may designate a license as allowed for documentation if it meets the criteria for allowed licenses and it is specifically designed for documentation.

In addition, Fedora classifies the following licenses as allowed for documentation even though they do not meet the criteria for allowed licenses:

“Content” means any material that is not code, documentation, fonts or firmware. Here are some examples of content:

Fedora may designate a license as allowed for content if it meets the criteria for allowed licenses with the following exceptions:

Fedora may designate a license as allowed for 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) is not-allowed.

While Fedora aims for stability in its license classifications, they have never been set in stone. Fedora’s 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. This is most likely to involve an allowed license being reclassified as not-allowed. When this sort of reclassification is done, we will try to minimize disruption, including by making use of appropriate usage exceptions for licenses no longer classified as allowed. A good example is the reclassification of CC0 as being allowed only for content.

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 many 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.