Licensing directions for Fedora content

[Richard Fontana]

On Wed, 08 Apr 2009 01:04:47 +0530
Rahul Sundaram <sundaram at fedoraproject.org> wrote:

> * Would you recommend CC-BY-SA or GNU FDL as the choice to go forward
> with? Which one

I think either choice is sufficiently reasonable that it's something
for the Fedora Project to decide. So, no recommendation.

> * Would you recommend a dual licensing strategy or just a single
> license to switch to?

Based on what was discussed upthread, I assume you mean a policy of
keeping Fedora content under OPL but also offering it under another
license like CC-BY-SA. There may be some advantage to this, but I'm
not sure what it would be. Still, such dual-licensing would not be
unreasonable on its face; after all, OPL has been the established Fedora
content license for a long time. So, no recommendation. 

> Somewhat out of scope for this discussion, could a future revision of
> the Fedora CLA have a counter promise from Red Hat to keep the
> contributions, free and open?

I'm hoping that the Fedora board and Red Hat Legal can make progress on
revising the Fedora CLA in the near future. Although the form of the
current CLA is probably better suited to a project like Apache than to
a project like Fedora, I think the way that Fedora has been applying the
CLA in practice is actually good, and points the way toward possible
revision.  Perhaps the best way for a contributor to keep contributions
free and open is for that contributor to explicitly place a copyleft
license on his or her contributions, which any Fedora contributor can
do today under the existing CLA.  

 - RF