On 12/6/21 2:50 PM, Richard Fontana wrote:
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.
Agreed, we should maintain the "content" and "documentation" approved
licenses distinction and then document the difference and rationale
explicitly, which I believe you may already be working on :)
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.
Interesting question here... perhaps for the time being we keep the
distinction, if nothing else than the ease of human minds tendency to
think about software and documentation as being different. Again, the
rationale and explanation should be explicit in the legal/licensing
pages. (seems like some of this email will be a helpful start for said
explanations!)
I suspect if, later on, we decided to collapse the documentation
category into the greater software category, that would be pretty easy
(as we'll have created the full data base by then)
Jilayne
Anyway, I was just wondering if anyone had any thoughts or comments on this.
Those are my two cents!
Jilayne
_______________________________________________
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
