[Fedora-legal-list] Re: Updated IEEE license
* Richard Fontana:
On Thu, May 12, 2022 at 11:19 AM Florian Weimer
<fweimer(a)redhat.com> wrote:
>
> The licensing wiki says that the IEEE license is a “good” documentation
> license. However, with the 2017 release, IEEE switched to this license:
>
> | The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and The Open Group,
> | have given us permission to reprint portions of their documentation.
> |
> | In the following statement, the phrase ``this text'' refers to portions of
> | the system documentation.
> |
> | Portions of this text are reprinted and reproduced in electronic form in
> | the Linux man-pages project, from IEEE Std 1003.1-2017, Standard for
> | Information Technology -- Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX), The
> | Open Group Base Specifications Issue 7, 2018 Edition, Copyright (C) 2018
> | by The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc and The Open
> | Group. In the event of any discrepancy between these versions and the
> | original IEEE and The Open Group Standard, the original IEEE and The Open
> | Group Standard is the referee document. The original Standard can be
> | obtained online at http://www.opengroup.org/unix/online.html .
> |
> | This notice shall appear on any product containing this material.
>
>
<https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/man-pages/man-pages-posix/...
>
> This license no longer permits modified redistribution, as far as I can
> see. Is this still an acceptable documentation license as far as Fedora
> is concerned?
I think this should not be considered an acceptable license for
documentation, given the differences from the version reproduced in
the Fedora wiki
(https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing:IEEEDocLicense).
Copying Joshua Gay for awareness.
What should we do here?
In the CC0 context, it was mentioned that Fedora considers restrictions
on modification acceptable for documentation licenses. Wouldn't this
make the updated IEEE license acceptable as well? Or is a total ban on
modified redistribution going too far?
Should we remove content that uses this updated IEEE license from Fedora?
Thanks,
Florian