changing content licenses (OPL => CC BY SA)

Tom "spot" Callaway tcallawa at redhat.com
Thu Jun 25 22:48:29 UTC 2009


On 06/25/2009 03:22 PM, Karsten Wade wrote:
> When we went from GFDL to OPL we specifically had to ask everyone
> because none of the content works were under the Fedora CLA.  The
> stated reasoning at the time iirc was, we wouldn't have to do this
> check with everyone again if we had to relicense because we had the
> CLA.

I think the important distinction that I missed was that I thought you
were only referring to the reference documentation in the separate files
(e.g. Release Guide), where there are well defined lists of the
contributors. For the wiki, that task is far too major and we would
definitely want to leverage the CLA to relicense that content.

In the future, I want to retain that relicensing power for the wiki, but
I think we can do so with a bit more finesse, e.g. something like:

*****

Please note that all contributions to FedoraProject may be edited,
altered, or removed by other contributors. If you do not want your
writing to be edited mercilessly, then do not submit it here. You are
also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a
public domain or similar free resource (see FedoraProject:Copyrights for
details). DO NOT SUBMIT COPYRIGHTED WORK WITHOUT PERMISSION! By making
changes to the Fedora Project wiki, you are giving a contributed work to
Fedora under the terms of the $CURRENTLICENSE, or a future Free Software
License as determined by the Fedora Documentation Team. If you do not
agree to this licensing grant, do not make any changes to the wiki.

*****

My hope is that if we can do this, we can enable people to edit the wiki
without requiring anyone to sign the CLA, as a lot (possibly most) of
the "contributions" on the wiki are not individually copyrightable
anyways. They'd still need to create a FAS user account to prevent wiki
spam, but we remove some of the unnecessary stop energy. We would also
still retain the nuclear option to relicense the wiki (which most people
find acceptable), but we take it off the table for all other
contributions (which most people do not find acceptable that Fedora/Red
Hat could relicense at a whim).

Of course, RH Legal might say that this isn't plausible, but it's my dream.

~spot




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