On Tue, 2005-03-08 at 19:45 -0500, Elliot Lee wrote:

On Tue, 8 Mar 2005, Rahul Sundaram wrote:

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unfortunately not. fedora docs are to be licensed under GNU FDL. RHEL docs are licensed under OPL and these two licenses are incompatible with each other which means we will have to rewrite them for fedora from scratch . If RHEL docs cannot be relicensed under GNU FDL for any reason (I would like to know why)

I don't know if it is impossible, but it would be difficult to effect, and take so much time that the issue would be irrelevant by the time the change happened.

<dead_horse_beating>

If you want the history of this, Ed Bailey wrote a good piece that answers some of this:

http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-docs-list/2003-December/msg00085.html

I think there are two overall questions:

1. Why historically has Red Hat not allowed freer usage of the documentation content and source? This is answered in Ed's post.

2. What could we do with Enterprise Linux docs if we had full access to the source and content?

I think the real question to ponder is 2. Our first obstacle is that full-length guides are extremely difficult to keep accurate and relevant. We have a full-time, fully-loaded documentation team working on these manuals throughout the 12 to 18 month release cycle of Enterprise Linux, and I can personally tell you that I was fixing content for the Red Hat SELinux Guide literally up to the last hour before publication.

Full-length documentation is too big of a bite for us to chew at this time.

However, we can make our documents modular so they will fit together into bound guides. That is something to work toward.

If we had had the RHL 9 full doc set, branched and sitting in CVS for our usage in FC 1, would we have it updated for the release? That's the question to ask ourselves honestly.

I'm an optimistic person, and I still think the answer would be, "No."

Move to the present and ask the same question about the current Enterprise Linux docs set. The answer is even more "no" than before.

All that said, there are parts of the guides that would be useful, as Stuart has pointed out. Where that happens, I'm afraid our best option is the brute-force method -- just write it ourselves.

At the present, the state of FC 4 and Enterprise Linux 4 are divergent enough that even if we had all the source in CVS to work on, it would be a massive undertaking for even just one guide.

</dead_horse_beating>

AFAIC, this topic is still open for discussion until everyone is comfortable with leaving the past behind us and moving forward with a Fedora-only docs set.

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then it would be a better idea to allow fedora docs to be licensed under OPL

It may be that Fedora docs do not need to be under the FDL. It would be interesting to know where this policy is laid out, and the reasoning behind it.

Interesting question. This point predates my involvement with the project, Tammy would have more answers here. Does the Fedora Project have guidelines on this?

I think it's irrelevant, however. Having matching licenses wouldn't help integration. Red Hat is unlikely to bring Fedora content into Enterprise Linux documents because of the copyright ownership issues. This goes directly back to the historical point Ed makes. There are some things Red Hat needs to maintain full ownership of in order to be able to put the Red Hat brand on it.

Fundamentally, documentation is very different from source code. You can significantly change the meaning of something by tweaking just one word or punctuation mark. The semantic meaning of language is far richer than the output of programmed bits. Documentation embodies ideas that source code cannot.

- Karsten

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I think it's irrelevant, however. Having matching licenses wouldn't help integration.

I think it will by the opening up *potential* ways to incorporate content from RHEL docs to fedora

Read the copyright page on the RHEL manuals:

"Distribution of substantively modified versions of this document is prohibited without the explicit permission of the copyright holder."

Meaning that Fedora docs, which would count as the aforementioned "substantively modified versions," would be subject to this clause. Every single version... which is completely compatible with the OPL (q.v. Section VI), and again, which is due to completely understandable business reasons. Putting FDP work under the OPL does not mitigate this problem in the least.

Red Hat is unlikely to bring

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Fedora content into Enterprise Linux documents because of the copyright ownership issues.

yes I understand that but I am checking to see if it would work the other way around if fedora docs project can accept OPL licensed documents

If we switched to the OPL -- which, by the way, would mean that every existing document which is already FDL'd would have to be rewritten -- we would still be required to adhere to any additional restrictions placed by copyright holders on their OPL documents. Hence, the same problem could occur multiple times for a single document. I'm not a FDL flag-waver, but the FDL for all its shortcomings does at least mean we have a clear path to follow.

Karsten believes he beat this dead horse, but I made a tasty soup. Mmm, good! (Uh-oh, better watch out for the Slogan Police(tm).) :-D