changing content licenses (OPL => CC BY SA)

Karsten Wade kwade at redhat.com
Thu Jun 25 01:58:16 UTC 2009


The Docs Team has recently reached consensus to change licenses that
cover the various full-size guides the team works on, such as the
Release Notes and the Installation Guide.  Currently the works are
under the OPL 1.0, and the intention is to switch to the CC BY SA 3.0.

This move is supported (actually, recommended) by Red Hat's Legal
team.  The full discussion with Richard Fontana occured on
fedora-docs-list[1] and via fedora-legal-list[2].  It is worth
reviewing to understand approaches for past and future works.

Richard states in his initial opinion in reply to Spot:

    On Tue, 26 May 2009 17:29:20 -0400
    "Tom \"spot\" Callaway" <tcallawa redhat com> wrote:

    > I know Richard reads fedora-legal-list, so I'll wait for him to
    > chime in, but in the past, he's expressed that he would very
    > much like for us to move the wiki from OPL to CC-BY-SA.

    Such a decision should be made by Fedora qua Fedora, consistent
    with Fedora's licensing guidelines and general rationality (which
    is true of the current situation with the use of the OPL and would
    be true if the license of choice were CC-BY-SA instead).

Arguably, the Docs Team could proceed with a relicensing for
e.g. Release Notes and Installation Guide simply by discussing with
the Fedora Project Board.  However, it is clear to us that we should
consider relicensing the entire fedoraproject.org/wiki, probably all
of fedoraproject.org/.*, and perhaps make it the default unless
otherwise specified for *.fedoraproject.org.

I am now here to get Fedora Project's opinion/consensus/decision on
this ("... decision ... by Fedora qua Fedora ...")

Thanks - Karsten

Cc: fedora-docs-list at redhat.com

[1]
Original thread:

http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-docs-list/2009-April/msg00061.html

... and gains momentum here:

http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-docs-list/2009-May/msg00130.html

[2]
Paul bounces the thread to fedora-legal-list:

http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-legal-list/2009-May/msg00042.html

... and Richard Fontana replies:

http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-legal-list/2009-May/msg00045.html
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-legal-list/2009-May/msg00047.html

-- 
Karsten 'quaid' Wade, Community Gardener
http://quaid.fedorapeople.org
AD0E0C41
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/docs/attachments/20090624/cbfb3216/attachment.bin 


More information about the docs mailing list