This documentation covers various Fedora policies, guidelines and other information pertaining to licensing and other legal issues.
NOTE: Much of the Fedora guidelines on licensing and how to populate the `License:` field in spec files was updated in July 2022. Please review this documentation! As the community gets familiar with the new documentation, we expect that further refinements will be made.
NOTE: Much of the Fedora guidelines on licensing and how to populate the `License:` field in spec files was updated in July 2022. Please review this documentation!
== Licensing in Fedora
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 packaged in Fedora Linux must be under licenses determined to be allowed in Fedora, with only limited, conditional exceptions.
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 packaged in Fedora Linux, or otherwise used in or created for Fedora, must be under licenses determined to be allowed in Fedora, with only limited, conditional exceptions.
See the links here for understanding xref:license-approval.adoc[what kinds of licenses are allowed in Fedora], lists of xref:allowed-licenses.adoc[allowed] and xref:not-allowed-licenses.adoc[not-allowed] licenses, xref:license-field.adoc[populating the `License:` field] in a package spec file, and the process for xref:license-review-process.adoc[reviewing new licenses].
Richard Fontana <rfontana@redhat.com>