Licensing directions for Fedora content

[Tom "spot" Callaway]

On 04/06/2009 02:21 PM, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> My understanding is that, CLA does not make Red Hat, a additional
> copyright holder but only allows Red Hat the right to use the content.
> Also Red Hat's content for RHEL doesn't use OPL with the restrictions as
> it used to before. Can spot go through this FAQ and make it up2date?
> 
> If we decide to relicense the wiki/published content under CC share
> alike license, do we have to ask again all our contributors? My
> understanding is, yes since CLA doesn't assign copyright to Red Hat as
> the blog post claims.

So, in reply:

* The CLA does not make Red Hat a copyright holder, unless the
contributor explicitly assigns their copyright to Red Hat.
* The CLA does give us the right to relicense any contributions that
Fedora receives without an explicit license assignment from the upstream
author. (It is likely that this will not be the case in future CLA
revisions, as it also means that Fedora could relicense these
contributions under non-free licensing terms, even though that is not
our intent and we have never done so).
Basically, what that means is that if someone committed changes to
documentation without explicitly stating that those changes were under
the OPL, we could relicense those changes without their permission. I
suspect that very few (if any) Fedora Docs contributions came in with a
license attached.

hth,

~spot