Licensing directions for Fedora content

[Karsten Wade]

On Mon, Apr 06, 2009 at 01:55:50PM -0400, Tom spot Callaway wrote:
> On 04/06/2009 01:37 PM, Karsten Wade wrote:
> 
> > In a nutshell, here is why we have not used the CC or GNU FDL in
> > Fedora Docs:
> > 
> > * CC has no warranty protection clause.  This is important in
> >   countries such as the US; we put out technical content that could
> >   blow up someone's computer if they misuse it or we edit it
> >   incorrectly, we don't want to be liable for that.
> 
> This is incorrect. I suspect you were reading the "English Human
> Summary" version of the CC license. For example, see this section from
> the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 license:

Ah, I am not up to date on my reading, hadn't noticed the 3.0 had
these clauses.
 
> > Regardless of all that, if Red Hat wants to continue using the OPL,
> > perhaps Fedora Docs could dual-license content.  That way we could
> > blend in GNU FDL content from e.g. GNOME, and do it so it doesn't
> > actually mix with our dual-licensed content for our OPL-preferring
> > downstream.
> 
> Red Hat Legal, while tolerant of our OPL stance, would actually much
> prefer it if we went to CC-BY-SA for our docs. I've asked them to double
> check that this is acceptable to them, and if so, draft up some wording
> around how we would like people to give us attribution (that is the real
> weakness in CC-BY-SA).

Heh, so it's now Fedora's OPL stance? :) I just always wanted the
freest and easiest to work with license.

A few years ago Mark Webbink gave me a scale that I published
somewhere.  In that, using the CC-BY-SA was acceptable where it is
commodity technology content and not specifically one of "our
products", in this case Fedora the distro, our web apps, etc.  I
understood this to be for the lack of warranty clause.  If that is no
longer the case, then I think we should seriously consider adding the
CC-BY-SA 3.0 to our usage for Fedora Docs content and probably all
Fedora web content.

> I would not advocate going with GFDL. More trouble than it is worth.

It looks like the FDL 1.3 clauses that allow compatibility with the
CC-BY-SA are set to expire in Aug 2009.  What does this mean about our
ability to pull in and use FDL content?  To work with upstreams to
relicense or dual-license?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Free_Documentation_License#Compatibility_with_CC-BY-SA

Thanks Spot,

- Karsten
-- 
Karsten 'quaid' Wade, Community Gardener
http://quaid.fedorapeople.org
AD0E0C41
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