changing content licenses (OPL => CC BY SA)

[Paul W. Frields]

On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 06:58:16PM -0700, Karsten Wade wrote:
> The Docs Team has recently reached consensus to change licenses that
> cover the various full-size guides the team works on, such as the
> Release Notes and the Installation Guide.  Currently the works are
> under the OPL 1.0, and the intention is to switch to the CC BY SA 3.0.
> 
> This move is supported (actually, recommended) by Red Hat's Legal
> team.  The full discussion with Richard Fontana occured on
> fedora-docs-list[1] and via fedora-legal-list[2].  It is worth
> reviewing to understand approaches for past and future works.
> 
> Richard states in his initial opinion in reply to Spot:
> 
>     On Tue, 26 May 2009 17:29:20 -0400
>     "Tom \"spot\" Callaway" <tcallawa redhat com> wrote:
> 
>     > I know Richard reads fedora-legal-list, so I'll wait for him to
>     > chime in, but in the past, he's expressed that he would very
>     > much like for us to move the wiki from OPL to CC-BY-SA.
> 
>     Such a decision should be made by Fedora qua Fedora, consistent
>     with Fedora's licensing guidelines and general rationality (which
>     is true of the current situation with the use of the OPL and would
>     be true if the license of choice were CC-BY-SA instead).
> 
> Arguably, the Docs Team could proceed with a relicensing for
> e.g. Release Notes and Installation Guide simply by discussing with
> the Fedora Project Board.  However, it is clear to us that we should
> consider relicensing the entire fedoraproject.org/wiki, probably all
> of fedoraproject.org/.*, and perhaps make it the default unless
> otherwise specified for *.fedoraproject.org.
> 
> I am now here to get Fedora Project's opinion/consensus/decision on
> this ("... decision ... by Fedora qua Fedora ...")

IMHO, a move to CC BY-SA is more supportive of Fedora's mission to
promote free and interchangeable content, and makes sense.

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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