[Fedora-legal-list] Request for Comments: Fedora Project Contributor Agreement Draft (Replacement for Fedora Individual Contributor License Agreement)

[Richard Fontana]

On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 08:58:52AM -0400, Tom spot Callaway wrote:
> I was the one who recommended MIT, because:
> 
> 1. It is extremely permissive, possibly the most common "permissive"
> Free license.
> 2. Unlike many of the major common Free licenses (GPL, Apache, MPL), it
> is pretty much universally compatible with other Free licenses.
> 3. It is very very similar to the "license" that we were using for
> unlicensed contributions with the old Fedora ICLA.
> 
> That particular MIT variant was chosen on the merits of its legal wording.

Fedora classifies a large set of closely-related licenses as
'MIT'. Most of these are actually legacy licenses.  The variant we
chose, however, is the de facto standard version of the MIT license
today, and as such it is one of the most popular FOSS licenses.  So
that is an additional good feature of this license.  We briefly
thought about writing our own license, but on reflection this didn't
seem like a good idea. We don't want to encourage license
proliferation if we can avoid it; it was therefore important to choose
a license that, today, is widely used.
 
> When we looked at content licensing, there was a much smaller set of
> licenses to consider. We wanted to use a license that was permissive and
> as compatible as possible with other content licensing. That narrowed it
> down pretty quickly to the Creative Commons licenses, and given the fact
> that the wiki had already switched to CC-BY-SA, we decided to go with
> it. The waiver of clause 4d was done when Red Hat Legal determined it
> had the potential, if enacted, to make the work non-free.

Yes, this relates to some poor wording in an otherwise very good
license (CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported), with the potential for an undesirable
interpretation not intended by the license drafters, and something
ikely to be corrected in future versions of CC-BY-SA (CC-BY-SA 3.0
content is automatically relicensable to later versions of CC-BY-SA).
Currently Fedora documentation is licensed out by Red Hat under
CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported with Red Hat making the same waiver.
 
For content licenses, we basically had four choices: (1) public domain
dedication, (2) a Creative Commons license, (3) a non-widely-used
content license, or (4) a free software license (like the MIT
license). We decided against (1) because we want to make clear that
the contributor retains copyright. We decided against (2) because we
want to favor widely-used licenses and disfavor license proliferation,
all else being equal. We decided against (4) because we felt that
licenses specifically designed for software -- like the MIT license --
were not necessarily the most suitable choices for at least some
typical kinds of content contributed to Fedora, at least if good
licenses designed for content were available, as they are in the
Creative Commons license set. Among the Creative Commons licenses,
there were basically two choices, CC-BY and CC-BY-SA.

We don't think that CC-BY's relationship to CC-BY-SA is sufficiently
analogous to that between MIT and GPL (and other strong copyleft
licenses) to justify the choice of CC-BY based on a desire for license
compatibility.  Since CC-BY and CC-BY-SA therefore seemed roughly
equal, we felt that a policy of promoting copyleft licensing where
feasible, and the fact that it had been adopted for Fedora wiki
content and docs with general enthusiasm (replacing the much
disfavored OPL), justified the choice of CC-BY-SA.

-- 
Richard E. Fontana
Red Hat, Inc.