On Mon, Aug 8, 2022 at 4:58 AM Florian Weimer <fweimer@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > What should we do here? > > In the CC0 context, it was mentioned that Fedora considers restrictions > on modification acceptable for documentation licenses. Wouldn't this > make the updated IEEE license acceptable as well? Or is a total ban on > modified redistribution going too far? Fedora makes a licensing policy distinction between "documentation" and "content". This is not new; I think it goes back to Fedora's earliest efforts to formulate licensing policy. I think the original policy, though this was not explicitly stated, was that documentation licenses had to meet the FSF's standards for _libre_ documentation licenses. In seeking a way to define this in a way that is not tied to FSF policy in this area (which itself is actually unclear), we recast it here: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/legal/license-approval/#_allowed_for_documentation There were a few recent threads on this list where I showed how I was struggling to re-describe Fedora's existing policy on documentation licenses. As we explain it now, documentation licenses are basically subject to the same strict standards as licenses in general (including licenses covering code); in particular they must allow modification with only software-freedom-consistent reasonable conditions. A few important exceptions are now noted for licenses that historically have been widely used for documentation in FOSS projects and which I think have all been regarded as libre by the FSF (CC-BY-SA, CC-BY, GFDL, OPL without so-called 'options'). These licenses have some (or, in the case of GFDL, potentially a lot of) terms in them that would never be tolerated for a license for code, so they have to be explicitly carved out. However, none of these licenses flat-out prohibits modification. The well established policy in Fedora was that licenses for 'content' can prohibit modification but can contain no other (non-FOSS) restrictions. In the recent reformulation of Fedora licensing policy we added that content licenses can also contain a "no patent license" clause of the sort seen in CC0 and ODbL. Depending on how you look at it, we are either preserving the old policy or relaxing it by explicitly allowing licenses with no-patent-license clauses. CC0 is being reclassified from being 'allowed' generally to only being allowed for content. I am not currently aware of any Fedora package using CC0 for documentation and I'm not sure what we'd do if we find that such a package exists. In response to this thread I added the 2017 IEEE license to the Fedora License Data repository a few weeks ago giving it "not-allowed" status: https://gitlab.com/fedora/legal/fedora-license-data/-/blob/main/data/LicenseRef-IEEE-2017.toml So as to what to do, > Should we remove content that uses this updated IEEE license from Fedora? The assumption here is that this covers some material in man pages and that man pages are properly classified as 'documentation'. So, I think the options are: * Remove whatever is covered by the updatd IEEE license from Fedora * try to convince IEEE to change the license (given that IEEE had an acceptable license in the past this seemed like a possibility) * someone can argue that a special usage exception should be applied to some uses of this license * someone can argue that classifying this license as 'not-allowed' is wrong under current policy * someone can argue that the current policy should be changed 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, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
