On Thu, May 12, 2022 at 11:19 AM Florian Weimer fweimer@redhat.com wrote:

The licensing wiki says that the IEEE license is a “good” documentation license. However, with the 2017 release, IEEE switched to this license:

| The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and The Open Group, | have given us permission to reprint portions of their documentation. | | In the following statement, the phrase ``this text'' refers to portions of | the system documentation. | | Portions of this text are reprinted and reproduced in electronic form in | the Linux man-pages project, from IEEE Std 1003.1-2017, Standard for | Information Technology -- Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX), The | Open Group Base Specifications Issue 7, 2018 Edition, Copyright (C) 2018 | by The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc and The Open | Group. In the event of any discrepancy between these versions and the | original IEEE and The Open Group Standard, the original IEEE and The Open | Group Standard is the referee document. The original Standard can be | obtained online at http://www.opengroup.org/unix/online.html . | | This notice shall appear on any product containing this material.

https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/man-pages/man-pages-posix/man-pages-posix-2017-a.tar.gz

This license no longer permits modified redistribution, as far as I can see. Is this still an acceptable documentation license as far as Fedora is concerned?

I think this should not be considered an acceptable license for documentation, given the differences from the version reproduced in the Fedora wiki (https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing:IEEEDocLicense).

Copying Joshua Gay for awareness.

Richard

On Mon, Aug 8, 2022 at 4:58 AM Florian Weimer fweimer@redhat.com 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_do...

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/License...

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