Hi, The standard license for Fedora documentation today is CC BY-SA 3.0 Unported (with a waiver of its ill-drafted moral rights clause). The "BY" part of the license shorthand name of course refers to the common feature of CC licenses providing for attribution to the author or some other designated entity. Currently the boilerplate legal notice handles attribution by saying: The original authors of this document, and Red Hat, designate the Fedora Project as the "Attribution Party" for purposes of CC-BY-SA. In accordance with CC-BY-SA, if you distribute this document or an adaptation of it, you must provide the URL for the original version. The first sentence there is somewhat cryptic for someone who hasn't read the so-called "Legal Code" of CC BY-SA 3.0. Basically section 4(c) says that a distributor of the original or a derivative work must (1) preserve copyright notices and (2) provide the name of the "Original Author" (as defined, for a Fedora manual I'd say this would be any named human authors or any substitute like "Fedora Documentation Team" in the Installation Guide). In addition or alternatively, the "Original Author and/or Licensor" can designate an "Attribution Party", in which case the distributor must provide the name of that Attribution Party. So we've been saying "the Fedora Project" is that Attribution Party. Note also that Red Hat appears in this legal text as *the* "Licensor" for what are now basically obsolete reasons as a result of changes in the recently-implemented Fedora Project Contributor Agreement. I *think* that was one of the reasons for using the "Attribution Party" idea. CC BY-SA 3.0 goes on to require the distributor to provide the original title of the work and "to the extent reasonably practicable, the URI, if any, that Licensor specifies to be associated with the Work". There's even more detail, but that's the gist of it. That requirement about the "URI" is the explanation for the second sentence of the Fedora docs legal notice excerpt I quoted above. We are looking at revising the legal notice, which provides an opportunity to improve the attribution part. If I'm not mistaken, people on the docs team have independently given some thought recently to the issue of desired attribution. My current suggestion is to replace the above excerpt with: Required attribution under CC BY-SA shall include the names of all listed authors of this document; the name of the Fedora Project together with the URL <http://fedoraproject.org/>; and the URL for the original version of this document. Does anyone have any suggestions for improvements on that? For example: * Would it make more sense to speak of "the Fedora Documentation Project" and the URL <http://docs.fedoraproject.org/> (at which that term is used) rather than the more general reference to Fedora? * Is attribution to anything other than the listed authors desired at all? * Is it reasonable at all to include the specific URL of the original web version of the document as we've been doing (I don't know how permanent these are expected to be)? Thanks, Richard E. Fontana Open Source Licensing and Patent Counsel Red Hat, Inc. -- docs mailing list docs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/docs
