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Greetings:
I'm glad that we're having this discussion, because there are internal issues that need to be cleared up *before* they become issues elsewhere.
I hadn't previously noticed the biggest issue here, which is the hypothetical situation where another group wants to re-use Fedora Docs material. If, for example, Ubuntu wanted to re-release the Musicians' Guide, they would try to write a CC-BY-SA attribution statement, and find the following text on the front page of the Guide:
"Christopher Antila Fedora Documentation Project crantila@feodraproject.org - ------------------------------------------------- Legal Notice Copyright (c) 2011 Red Hat, Inc. and others"
To whom would Ubuntu attribute the document? Reading a little further into the Legal Notice, we see this:
"The original authors of this document, and Red Hat, designate the Fedora Project as the "Attribution Party" for purposes of CC-BY-SA."
For me, this clears up the question of attribution. But what of the Red Hat copyright notice?
I agree that we need a copyright notice, and I suggest that every appearance of "Red Hat" in the Legal Notice is replaced with something like "Author Group" or "Authors of This Document," possibly with a hyperlink, but definitely with an Appendix titled "Author Group" or "Authors of This Document" or something like that. This allows us to attribute copyright to all contributors to a document, while at the same time keeping a clean appearance on the front page. In fact, I'd be happy with entirely removing the list of authors from the front page.
As for attribution to the Fedora wiki, I wrote this CC-BY-SA attribution notice into the Musicians' Guide after re-using documentation from elsewhere. [0] Please feel free to use it as a template, or to ignore it, as desired. (As an aside, I just noticed poor formatting on that page--shame on me!)
My scholarly "spider senses" suggest that we're actually talking about issues of communal ownership in an individual-centric society. I'm going to briefly research how other open-source organizations have solved similar problems, then post my findings to this list.
Christopher.
[0] http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/15/html/Musicians_Guide/sect- Musicians_Guide-SC-Basic_Programming-Legal_Attribution.html
On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 04:31:11PM -0400, Christopher Antila wrote:
I hadn't previously noticed the biggest issue here, which is the hypothetical situation where another group wants to re-use Fedora Docs material. If, for example, Ubuntu wanted to re-release the Musicians' Guide, they would try to write a CC-BY-SA attribution statement, and find the following text on the front page of the Guide:
"Christopher Antila Fedora Documentation Project crantila@feodraproject.org
Legal Notice Copyright (c) 2011 Red Hat, Inc. and others"
To whom would Ubuntu attribute the document? Reading a little further into the Legal Notice, we see this:
"The original authors of this document, and Red Hat, designate the Fedora Project as the "Attribution Party" for purposes of CC-BY-SA."
For me, this clears up the question of attribution. But what of the Red Hat copyright notice?
CC BY-SA 3.0 Unported requires the licensee-distributor to "keep intact all copyright notices".
- RF
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Christopher Antila -
Richard Fontana