[WesolyKubeczek]

There’s one thing I don’t understand. They keep saying GPL this, GPL that.

Meanwhile there has been this huge push to use permissive licenses for like two decades now, because GPL bad (you don’t have to go far, just look at any discussion around licensing here on HN).

There’s nothing in .spec files that says they have the same license as the software they cover. Fedora contributions are required to come with a MIT-like license.

So you have quite a small core of software under GPL — the kernel, glibc, coreutils, gcc, binutils, make… and not even the darling of security advisories, OpenSSL. Thanks to incessant corporate PR against GPL, the GPL-based software base is shrinking slowly but steadily. That Rust-based coreutils replacement? MIT.

[throw_a_grenade]

No, it's the other way around: GPL requires that all pieces required to compile the binary (the exact binary that triggers requirement for distributing source) needs to come along. IIUC if they distribute source as SRPMs, the .spec needs to be included and without limitations (legal or technical) that would prevent user from rebuilding the original software.

[WesolyKubeczek]

Well, nothing prevents you from rebuilding the upstream tarball, or tarball with RH's patches applied even, using upstream's instructions. Doesn't have to be the identical RPM package, does it?

I don't really know how this might or might not work. My gut says that since the .spec is meaningless without the sources, it's a Modification of the work and thus the spec, patches, and the resulting SRPM is definitely a Derived Work. But every time anything quasi-legal is being brought up here or anywhere else, it gets drowned in the arguments over what the meaning of the word "is" is, so I don't know how you can twist it, legally.

But then, the elephant in the room is that IBM may decide to give away only the GPLed SRPMs, and say a big fuck you to anything more permissive. People rallying against copyleft have made quite an impact, and the GPLed landscape is shrinking.

[angus-prune]

Perhaps I'm missing something, but doesn't it have to be the source for an identical rpm package.

If the rpm package is the binary they're distributing, than that's also the source they have to distribute.

The gpl isn't literally about the community, upstream, downstream. The gpl is simply - if you give me a binary, you have to also give me (or ensure I have access to) the source for that binary. The source to a similar binary doesn't cut it.

[voxadam]

Is an RPM spec file even copyrightable? It's pretty much the definition of tabular data akin to a simple recipe or a phonebook, neither of which are subject to copyright under US law as I understand things. I'm also not convinced that a spec file would satisfy the "threshold of originality" to make it copyrightable.