Licensing directions for Fedora content

[Karsten Wade]

On Mon, Apr 06, 2009 at 02:23:25PM -0400, Tom spot Callaway wrote:
> On 04/06/2009 02:21 PM, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> > My understanding is that, CLA does not make Red Hat, a additional
> > copyright holder but only allows Red Hat the right to use the content.
> > Also Red Hat's content for RHEL doesn't use OPL with the restrictions as
> > it used to before. Can spot go through this FAQ and make it up2date?
> > 
> > If we decide to relicense the wiki/published content under CC share
> > alike license, do we have to ask again all our contributors? My
> > understanding is, yes since CLA doesn't assign copyright to Red Hat as
> > the blog post claims.
> 
> So, in reply:
> 
> * The CLA does not make Red Hat a copyright holder, unless the
> contributor explicitly assigns their copyright to Red Hat.

Whoops, I had no idea that was there, that was an editing slip for
sure. The mistaken section was here:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DocsProject/Licensing/FAQ#Do_I_Have_Absolute_Control_Over_My_Work_.3F

I have fixed it to say this:

  === Do I Have Absolute Control Over My Work ? ===

  You have copyright over all of the material that you contribute to
  the Fedora Project.

  In order to ensure that documentation may be continue to be
  maintained and distributed, the process of submitting content,
  including on the wiki, to the Fedora Documentation Project includes
  a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) that gives Red Hat, on behalf
  of the Fedora Project, an copyright license for the work. This does
  not affect your own rights in any way.


> * The CLA does give us the right to relicense any contributions that
> Fedora receives without an explicit license assignment from the upstream
> author. (It is likely that this will not be the case in future CLA
> revisions, as it also means that Fedora could relicense these
> contributions under non-free licensing terms, even though that is not
> our intent and we have never done so).

My thought was to seek consensus across the project (Docs + Board,
most likely) to do dual-license, rather than trying to contact
individual copyright holders.  The Fedora Project holds the reigns in
the CLA (in effect), and should act as it sees fit; that's what the
intention of the CLA is, rather than having to micromanage every
decision with every contributor in perpetuity.

> Basically, what that means is that if someone committed changes to
> documentation without explicitly stating that those changes were under
> the OPL, we could relicense those changes without their permission. I
> suspect that very few (if any) Fedora Docs contributions came in with a
> license attached.

I have never seen a license attached, except for the RPM Guide that
was relicensed under our choice, which was the OPL.  We have to look
at that trail and find out if the original copyright holder assigned
copyright or only submitted under the CLA.

- Karsten
-- 
Karsten 'quaid' Wade, Community Gardener
http://quaid.fedorapeople.org
AD0E0C41
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-docs-list/attachments/20090406/4a2f33b9/attachment.sig>