License Compatibility

License compatibility is a FOSS legal folk doctrine that concerns the combinability of code covered by different licenses. It has no specific basis in statutory or judge-made law. Much of the discourse around license compatibility is incoherent, contradictory and poorly reasoned, and rests on dubious interpretive foundations.

Even when relatively clearly formulated, pronouncements on license compatibility tend to have a restrictive bias. Fedora has long taken a skeptical view of such pronouncements, which are typically inconsistent with deeply established packaging traditions and development practices of community Linux distributions and other FOSS community projects.

Despite this general standpoint of skepticism, Fedora takes assertions of license incompatibility seriously. Indeed, in (extremely) rare cases, packages have been excluded from Fedora Linux because of a license incompatibility issue.

If you believe there is a license incompatibility problem of some sort raised by a Fedora Linux package, we encourage you to file a bug report. We will investigate the issue in due course.