[Fedora-legal-list] Re: Licensing translations provided via Zanata (and now Weblate)
On Thu, 2020-01-09 at 14:46 -0500, Tom Callaway wrote:
In the US, translations are an original copyrighted work, not a
derivative
copyrighted work.
That said, the Fedora FPCA is different from most CLAs, in that its
sole
purpose is to ensure that Fedora has permission to use contributions
without an explicit license under a Free license (MIT for code, CC-
BY-SA
for content). If a contribution is made with a different Free license
(e.g.
same as the upstream), Fedora uses that licensing.
So, lets step through the process:
= No explicit license =
1. A Fedora contributor makes translation changes and contributes
their
changes to Fedora, without indicating a license.
2. The Fedora FPCA says that Fedora (and anyone who receives that
contribution from Fedora) can use that change under CC-BY-SA (I'm
guessing
that translations count as content).
3. The upstream can take the changes from Fedora under CC-BY-SA.
OR
= Explicit license =
1. A Fedora contributor makes translation changes and contributes
their
changes to Fedora under a specific license (e.g. BSD, because that is
what
upstream uses).
2. Fedora takes those contributions under the BSD license. (The FPCA
permits this, as long as the license is acceptable for Fedora, aka, a
Free
license.)
3. The upstream can take the changes from Fedora under BSD.
The way I see it, it’s impossible to verify whether all contributions
came implicitly-licensed, so would it be a safe assumption now to mark
the license in Weblate as CC-BY-SA-3.0? Neither Zanata nor Weblate
really account for each contribution possibly being licensed
differently.
Does that help?
Yes, it does, thank you.
--
Ernestas Kulik
Associate Software Engineer - Base Operating Systems (Core
Services/ABRT)
Red Hat Czech, s.r.o.