[Fedora-legal-list] Re: Wikipedia license change

[Richard Fontana]

On Tue, 26 May 2009 17:29:20 -0400
"Tom \"spot\" Callaway" <tcallawa at 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).

FWIW, my personal view is that switching from OPL to CC-BY-SA makes a
lot of sense. In my opinion, the OPL is now a fairly dated license with
some flaws. That alone isn't a reason not to use it, for a content
author who happens to like it, but the availability of CC-BY-SA shows
that there is a license with the same desirable policies (from Fedora's
perspective) that is the result of more careful legal drafting. As
others have pointed out, CC-BY-SA is today a more widely used license,
has a track record of responsible revisions, and the author of the OPL
himself would seem to be in favor of OPL users moving on to CC
licenses. 

I've heard one or two people in the Fedora docs community say that
CC-BY-SA permits combination, or relicensing, under a broad set of
licenses with similar policies including the OPL. That is actually not
correct (at least for version 3.0 of CC-BY-SA). CC-BY-SA 3.0 says:

  You may Distribute or Publicly Perform an Adaptation only under the
  terms of: (i) this License; (ii) a later version of this License with
  the same License Elements as this License; (iii) a Creative Commons
  jurisdiction license (either this or a later license version) that
  contains the same License Elements as this License (e.g.,
  Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 US)); (iv) a Creative Commons Compatible
  License.

A "Creative Commons Compatible License" is defined as 

  a license that is listed at
  http://creativecommons.org/compatiblelicenses that has been approved
  by Creative Commons as being essentially equivalent to this License,
  including, at a minimum, because that license: (i) contains terms
  that have the same purpose, meaning and effect as the License
  Elements of this License; and, (ii) explicitly permits the
  relicensing of adaptations of works made available under that license
  under this License or a Creative Commons jurisdiction license with
  the same License Elements as this License.

However, http://creativecommons.org/compatiblelicenses says that "to
date, Creative Commons has not approved any licenses for
compatibility", and I don't think the OPL would meet the given standard
anyway. 


-- 
Richard E. Fontana
Open Source Licensing and Patent Counsel
Red Hat, Inc.