This question came up at a FUDCon discussion about the wiki.
The wiki globally asserts that pages are licensed under the OPL, and
we license in that fashion pursuant to contributors having signed the
CLA. However, in the FUDCon: namespace, we allow the public to edit
pages, because that's the nature of FUDCon. We do not require people
to become Fedora account holders or CLA signers to attend FUDCon, but
those people must be free to pre-register, thus these pages must be
editable by non-authenticated persons. These edits by
non-authenticated persons will be labeled with an IP address.
Notably, it's possible that a Fedora account holder (who could
authenticate) might accidentally edit these pages in a
non-authenticated way. The effect would be that the edit would look
like any other non-authenticated edit even though presumably the
Fedora account holder fully intended it to be an authenticated edit
and thus covered by the CLA, and so forth.
The wiki does not provide the means for a non-authenticated person to
confirm OPL licensing. It does warn anyone who saves an edit that
their work may be edited and that material must not be copied onto the
wiki without proper permission, and links to the Legal:Licenses page
where the OPL licensing statement lives. But there is no statement to
the effect that "By clicking the Save Page button, you agree that your
submission will be licensed under the terms found at _____".
Since we switched to MediaWiki it's possible that we've simply failed
to provide an equivalent language transfer in this case. So my
questions are as follows:
1. Can a non-authenticated person agree to the OPL license when
making a submission, such that the agreement is meaningful and
enforceable (or at least free of risk for the Fedora Project)
without personally identifying information?
2. If the answer to #1 is "yes," should we attach a statement of
affirmative licensing prominently near the "Save Page" button?
3. If the answer to #1 is "no," should we alter FUDCon:, and any
other namespace on the wiki designed to be publicly editable, to
provide their contents under public domain or no license, and
notate that on the Legal:Licenses page?
My hope is that the answers to #1 and #2 are "yes," but I wanted those
answers to emerge here on fedora-legal-list if possible.
--
Paul W. Frields http://paul.frields.org/
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http://redhat.com/ - - - - http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/
irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug
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