[Fedora-packaging] Digging up an old dead thread ...

[steve]

Hi,

First off apologies for the cross-post to fedora-legal-list, this message has 
some licensing questions, but I also wanted to keep context without having to 
send two separate mails.

First off some background, earlier this year, i expressed a desire to package 
some creative commons licensed content ...

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-packaging/2009-February/msg00054.html

After a bit of interest in this topic, including a general consensus that it 
might be a good idea, the thread died out since i could not follow up on this 
due to lack of time.

Now, however, I do have some time and so I decided to submit a few of packages 
as an example of the idea:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=507912
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=507915
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=507916

(Note that all these submissions are technical books in the same vein as 
diveintopython which already exists for Fedora.)

Now, I have 2 questions for fedora-legal:

a. Specific to the last two packages (ldd_pdf and javanotes) -- The upstream 
license for both of those specify the license version number (CC-BY-SA version 2 
and 2.5), however, the page that lists acceptable licenses for Fedora[1] does 
not provide any version numbers. So, should I modify the License tag or should 
the wiki page be updated ?

b. About other CC licensed content -- A lot of the available content is licensed 
with the Non-Commercial restriction, which is considered as a Bad License 
according to the wiki page on licensing. Why is non-commercial only restriction 
considered bad ? ...and is there an alternative to including this in the 
official Fedora repository -- for instance the rpm fusion repository ?

Now, coming to the original question i raised, would it make sense for me to 
submit additional such packages possibly even the non-tech related ? Can we have 
an 'alpha', 'beta' or 'rawhide' of a creative commons repository to see if the 
idea gains popularity and to create some policies regarding this ?

In any case, for people who'd already are sold on the idea, i've set up a 
repository which for now has only 7 rpms (all of them books/tutorials) but I 
intend on adding more. I've made them as Fedora Packaging Policy compliant as 
possible.

Feel free to try it out and suggest/contribute similar content that you would 
like to be packaged.

Note however, that these packages also include the CC content under the 
Non-Commercial restriction which Fedora considers Bad.

You may use the repository by creating the file '/etc/yum.repos.d/lonetwin.repo' 
with the following lines:

[lonetwin.net]
name=lonetwin's creative commons repo
baseurl=http://lonetwin.net/yum/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0

..and just in case you are wondering why should you trust my repo ? Well, you 
shouldn't. That said, none of the available packages are modified from the 
original source, they are just packaged as rpms.

Comments/suggestions are welcome. I hope that this thread does not die out like 
the last one.

cheers,
- steve

[1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing#Content_Licenses