On Tue, 26 May 2009 17:29:20 -0400 "Tom \"spot\" Callaway" <tcallawa@xxxxxxxxxx> 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). FWIW, my personal view is that switching from OPL to CC-BY-SA makes a lot of sense. In my opinion, the OPL is now a fairly dated license with some flaws. That alone isn't a reason not to use it, for a content author who happens to like it, but the availability of CC-BY-SA shows that there is a license with the same desirable policies (from Fedora's perspective) that is the result of more careful legal drafting. As others have pointed out, CC-BY-SA is today a more widely used license, has a track record of responsible revisions, and the author of the OPL himself would seem to be in favor of OPL users moving on to CC licenses. I've heard one or two people in the Fedora docs community say that CC-BY-SA permits combination, or relicensing, under a broad set of licenses with similar policies including the OPL. That is actually not correct (at least for version 3.0 of CC-BY-SA). CC-BY-SA 3.0 says: You may Distribute or Publicly Perform an Adaptation only under the terms of: (i) this License; (ii) a later version of this License with the same License Elements as this License; (iii) a Creative Commons jurisdiction license (either this or a later license version) that contains the same License Elements as this License (e.g., Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 US)); (iv) a Creative Commons Compatible License. A "Creative Commons Compatible License" is defined as a license that is listed at http://creativecommons.org/compatiblelicenses that has been approved by Creative Commons as being essentially equivalent to this License, including, at a minimum, because that license: (i) contains terms that have the same purpose, meaning and effect as the License Elements of this License; and, (ii) explicitly permits the relicensing of adaptations of works made available under that license under this License or a Creative Commons jurisdiction license with the same License Elements as this License. However, http://creativecommons.org/compatiblelicenses says that "to date, Creative Commons has not approved any licenses for compatibility", and I don't think the OPL would meet the given standard anyway. -- Richard E. Fontana Open Source Licensing and Patent Counsel Red Hat, Inc. -- fedora-docs-list mailing list fedora-docs-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-docs-list
