[Fedora-legal-list] Re: [publican-list] Adjusting copyright information

[Richard Fontana]

[removed publican-list from cc]

On Wed, 07 Oct 2009 18:44:54 -0500
Jason L Tibbitts III <tibbs at math.uh.edu> wrote:

[re: WTFPL] 

> Might I suggest simply modifying the offensive language?  I know
> license proliferation is bad, but if the result is legally equivalent
> and serves the necessary purpose then I don't see any reason not to
> just do it.
 
Certainly Fedora should be prepared to accept licenses that are
equivalent to the WTFPL just as it accepts the WTFPL. Also
there's no question that the WTFPL has earned an important place in
FOSS culture despite being rarely used. However, this is a
situation where Red Hat is acting as copyright holder and/or outbound
licensor. For *Red Hat code* we generally avoid licenses that are not
commonly used (i.e., that aren't associated with substantial project
communities), and we generally avoid licenses that are modified
versions of other licenses, unless the modified version is itself a
commonly-used license. Of course the mere fact that a license is
popular doesn't mean it's better, but we see a lot of value in
promoting license standardization.

For those reasons (and not any sense of primness), we wouldn't
encourage our developers to apply the WTFPL to Red Hat-copyrighted code,
and we'd certainly oppose applying some sanitized WTFPL derivative to
Red Hat-copyrighted code.  (On the other hand we encourage our
developers to make licensing decisions that are informed by concerns
about their users.) 

- RF