Description of problem: Just to clear this. I see it a s a bug that fedora-websites are using the OPL. Like here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal/Licenses The problem is that this is a license that: a. The creators suggest NOT to use it (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Publication_License) b. Is not suggested to be used by the free software foundation c. Does not allow interchange with more popular licenses like GFDL or Creative Commons. This license resulted in an island solution for Red Hat/Fedora, which can not be in the interest of the fedora project. This means that: a. Documentation progress is going to be slower as it could be b. You can not take parts of the Fedora documentation and put things in Wikipedia. Goals for a new license: a. Should be widely used excepted b. Should allow content exchange with other projects like Wikipedia or other distributions to be painless. c. Do not use licenses where the creators say, you should not use them. I think the current solution is nearly as stupid as Suns decision to use the PDL for the OpenOffice.org docs. Why does every project thinks it must have its own license that nobody else uses? Well not really nobody but the project itself and its sponsor. Fro my persepctive this looks if some people want to strategically dam up the spread of knowledge and documentation. And this is to be comdemned as this is not in the FLOSS sense. Possible workaround: * Publish under multiple licenses. Please reconsider the licensing.
Some of the claims here need to be discussed further. a. Other than the wikipedia reference which does have not any citation from the author, do you have any authoritative reference about the author not recommending the license? I could find any such information in http://opencontent.org/openpub/ b. Your claim that FSF does not suggest using it is incorrect. You seem to be confusing open publication license with the open content license which is a non-free license. Fedora project does not use the restrictive OPL options as FSF recommends. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html#FreeDocumentationLicenses C. The GNU FDL itself is incompatible with creative commons license both ways. So popularity of these licenses does not promote sharing of content. We considered using both GNU FDL and creative commons. GNU FDL is a complex license compared to OPL and has several known problems as explained in http://people.debian.org/~srivasta/Position_Statement.xhtml. The choice of OPL over creative commons attribution share alike license was due to the presence of proper disclaimers in the former which is important from the legal perspective. The situation is not like Sun PDL since Fedora Project did not create its own license but used one already in existence (see http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,20276,00.html for more details) and what was suitable for the project requirements. This license is widely used by several publications such as Oreilly, New Riders, education institutions, organizations like Red Hat, VA Linux documentation project and so on. PS: The choice of license is clearly not a bug and bugzilla is not a right forum for such discussions. Please consider taking this discussion to the fedora-docs list instead. Thank you.
a. I have seen such posts on http://opencontent.org/blog/. I think some of the old posts (2003 or so) are now gone. You can see one post http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/94 where he talks a bit about experiences with OPL. But as you can see in this blog they only talk about and use CC licenses now. b. I am not confusing this because I know the differences. The FSF is not clear - it say it CAN be used but it confuses people. Cite: "This creates a practical pitfall in using or recommending this license: if you recommend ``Use the Open Publication License, Version 1.0 but don't enable the options'', it would be easy for the second half of that recommendation to get forgotten; someone might use the license with the options, making a manual non-free, and yet think he or she is following your advice." c. This claim is incorrect. CC-BY-2.5 is not copyleft and can be relicensed as GFDL. PS: I have found many bugs about false licenses in bugzilla. I consider this at least an issue to be solved. Sure one can not discuss this here widely, but it is an issue, still because it dirtectly affects the use of the documentation and the work of the Fedora project.
a. I still dont see any authoritative reference from the author. Open publication content license continues to be widely used in many places. b. We only use the OPL without options within Fedora and clarify this in all the license notices very explicitly. The pitfall of using licenses where some variant has restrictions apply to both GNU FDL itself and creative commons set of licenses. (ie) they are not better in this matter. If FSF is not clear then they should not be cited as a argument in this discussion. FSF does list books licensed under open publication license without options as Free books and it is listed a free documentation license. C. You cannot copy content freely between CC BY 2.5 and GNU FDL and there is no inter sharing of content between them. GNU GPL, FDL, CC-BY, OPL all have different licensing terms and cannot form a common pool of content. If they were mutually compatible with each other, there would be no point in dual licensing content under these licenses. To clarify, we choose the OPL without the options for the following reasons * It is a Free documentation license and widely used. We did not want to create our own project specific license. * It is simpler than GNU FDL and does have some of the commonly reported issues with GNU FDL as referenced earlier. * It has proper attribution and other traits that are desirable in a license. It has explicit disclaimers as opposed to CC licenses which is important as a legal safeguard for authors. False licenses *are* bugs. This clearly is not a false license by any means even if you have any potential problems with it. We choose this license carefully and deliberately. Kindly take this discussion to the mailing lists. I would suggest fedora-docs list or send a mail to the moderated fedora-advisory-board list which has our legal counsel for input. Thanks.
The CC licenses also have distinct disadvantages, for example: * Irrevocability * Possible effective renunciation of copyright in some jurisdictions In any case, Rahul is right that this discussion belongs on the fedora-docs-list, especially before it gets escalated anywhere near the legal counsel stage. That queue is already quite full and this seems to me an issue better dealt with by the community, since it is not based on any real legal concern.
Reopening... didn't mean to shut off this conversation.
Don't bother. I give up on fedora.
Tickets move to docs-request so the fedora-websites component can be removed per request from Ricky.