changing content licenses (OPL => CC BY SA)

Tom "spot" Callaway tcallawa at redhat.com
Thu Jun 25 15:24:13 UTC 2009


On 06/25/2009 08:37 AM, Chris Tyler wrote:
> On Wed, 2009-06-24 at 18:58 -0700, Karsten Wade wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> I agree that CC is a much better choice than OPL.
> 
> How do we make this relicensing work? I.e., if contributor X agreed that
> their content could be used under the OPL, how is it that we can just
> take that content and distribute it under a different license? I don't
> remember if the CLA has any wording on this. (Obviously the intention of
> the licenses is very similar, but nonetheless it seems like a murky
> situation. We did have someone withdraw from Fedora and take their toys
> with them when we last made a license change on the the wiki, IIRC).

Well, basically, we really should ask the contributors to consent to the
relicensing, and get their "written" permission in email. Technically,
these contributions were made under the terms of the CLA, and unless
those folks explicitly stated that their contributions were under the
OPL, Fedora is technically able to relicense those contributions however
we desire.

I say "technically" a lot there, because I do not want to leverage that.
I think the clear intent of contributors contributing to an OPL licensed
document is that their contributions are under OPL terms. In fact, I
want to remove that loophole in the next revision of the Fedora CLA.

So, we should just go ahead and get permission from all the contributors
(writers and translators) to relicense their works, and if anyone does
not give permission, we should remove/replace their contribution.

~spot




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