A bunch of us are looking into various possible changes in how the information on Fedora good/bad licenses is maintained, reviewed, classified and represented. One aspect of this is the likely effective replacement of such wiki pages as https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing:Main with a repository (such as https://pagure.io/fedora-legal/license-data). Among other things this has prompted a review of how licenses are currently categorized by Fedora. In particular, Fedora has separate lists of good and bad licenses for content https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing:Main#Good_Licenses_3 https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing:Main#Bad_Licenses_3 and for documentation https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing:Main#Good_Licenses_2 https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing:Main#Bad_Licenses_2 A question that has arisen is whether we actually need to treat documentation and content as separate categories. "Content" (and documentation, software, fonts, etc.) are not defined in that wiki page as far as I can tell. (FWIW the FPCA defines "Content" in a way that includes documentation: "any copyrightable material that is not Code, such as, without limitation, (i) non-functional data sets, (ii) documentation, (iii) wiki edits, (iv) music files, (v) graphic image files, (vi) help files, and (vii) other kinds of copyrightable material that the Fedora Council has classified as "content" rather than "code".") There is some overlap in the content and documentation license lists and the other lists as well -- for example, CC-BY is given as a good documentation license and a good content license. I think the answer is "yes", because of this policy: "Note that content must be freely distributable without restriction for inclusion in Fedora, and that a written statement from the content owner granting this is considered an approved license for Fedora. The one exception is that we permit content (but only content) which restricts modification as long as that is the only restriction." And indeed the content license lists includes a few non-libre licenses including at least one well known one that does not permit derivative works -- CC BY-ND. I'm assuming that Fedora would not allow documentation under a non-libre license, if only because there isn't a similar caveat in the documentation license section and all the good documentation licenses appear to be assumed to be libre. I think there may be some arguable counterexamples that might be explained away as covering things that are non-documentation content as opposed to documentation. I also am pretty sure that Fedora has not attempted to officially list all the approved non-libre licenses for "content" but I'm not sure if this is something intentional. (The categorical example that comes to mind is the inclusion of certain kinds of files from standards documents, such as schemas and the like.) Separately, I wonder if Fedora really needs separate categories for software and documentation, if the criteria for approval are basically the same -- essentially, whether the license is libre (by Fedora's own assessment) -- except that documentation licenses are seen as normally unsuitable for software. It is clear (to me at least) that any good Fedora software license should be good for documentation as well, if only because in practice documentation in packages is often covered by the software license -- indeed, this is probably much more common than cases where a special documentation license is used. Anyway, I was just wondering if anyone had any thoughts or comments on this. Richard _______________________________________________ legal mailing list -- legal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to legal-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/legal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Do not reply to spam on the list, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure
