I'm currently evaluating what I should enter in the %license field of a .specs file. If something is MIT or GPL, it's relatively easy, but what if something isn't GPL?
Say you want to create a RPM package that contains a script, but you do not want to give permissions to anybody to distribute modified versions of the script. For example:
Copyright (c) 2017 Dude! @ Oracle Community. All Rights Reserved. Permission is hereby granted by the author to use this software free of charge for personal use. You may not plagiarize or remove the copyright notice, or sell, or distribute any modified version of this software.
That's obviously not GPL. I checked the following under Oracle Linux to see what other people are using:
# rpm -qa --qf "%{name}: %{license}\n" ... and found a few interesting ones, for example:
iwl2000-firmware: Redistributable, no modification permitted <- this however stipulates that the software/file is not executable.
oracleasmlib: Oracle Corporation <- not GPL compliant, hence not on OL distribution media.
Reading https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing:Main?rd=Licensing#Good_Licenses, what am I supposed to do with it - read through hundreds of licenses? Well, from what I can gather so far, it seems Fedora doesn't consider any license a good license if it does not allow the re-distribution of modified code anyway.
I suppose GPL is not a requirement for building a RPM package, but what is an appropriate license to use?
But let's assume I release my work under GPL? My problem, from what I understand, is that it does not restrict commercial use of the software. It's just a copyleft license. If I understand GPL correctly, it requires to maintain a changelog and keeping the original copyright and author, but what stops anyone from re-distributing something that was changed for the worse - still having my name in it?