[Fedora-legal-list] Re: W3C documentation license

[Tom "spot" Callaway]

On Mon, 2007-08-13 at 00:31 +0300, Ville Skyttä wrote:
> On Sunday 12 August 2007, you wrote:
> > On Sun, 2007-08-12 at 23:18 +0300, Ville Skyttä wrote:
> > > Hi spot,
> > >
> > > The Fedora Wiki licensing pages do not have an entry for the W3C
> > > Documentation License, only W3C software.  Could you look into it?  The
> > > license is online at
> > > http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/copyright-documents (currently
> > > redirects to
> > > http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/2002/copyright-documents-20021231).
> >
> > That license explicitly forbids derivative works, so I know what the FSF
> > will say about it (non-free).
> 
> Ouch.
> 
> > Do we have documentation of significance that is using it?
> 
> html401-dtds does ship the HTML 4.01 specification which is covered by that 
> license.  However, the DTDs and related items in it, which are the most 
> important bits of the package, lack a specific license but the W3C IPR FAQ 
> says in the absence of such a notice, they may be used under the W3C software 
> license: http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/IPR-FAQ-20000620#DTD
> 
> xhtml1-dtds also contains documentation under the W3C documentation license, 
> but unlike html401-dtds, only in the tarball inside the source rpm, not in 
> binary packages.

So, the 6 million dollar question is whether documentation is code or
content. We permit content which is freely redistributable but not
modifyable, and the W3C Documentation License meets that criteria.

I think it comes too close to code for my tastes, thus, the W3C
Documentation License is not ok for Fedora. I've added it to the "bad"
list.

I think this is simple enough, because nothing prevents the docs from
being placed online, and then replaced in the package with a text file
URL that points to the docs that we don't include.

I don't see a need to pull docs out of the SRPM under this license,
we've only had to use modified tarballs for cases where the item was
legally not redistributable. They definitely can't go into the binary
RPM though.

I'm forwarding this to fedora-legal-list, so it goes on the record. We
probably want to have these sorts of discussions there in the future.

~spot