Re: OPL licensing terms

On Dec 11, 2007, at 3:56 PM, Tim Jackson wrote:

Nuno Lopes wrote:

I really can't see why the OPL license makes it impossible to include the PHP manual in fedora.. Can you please enlight me? (and please don't use arguments such as FSF doesn't like the license..).

The OPL license doesn't. The additional, optional parts of the OPL license that prevent distribution of modifications do, because Fedora as a fundamental policy is a distribution that includes only items that don't restrict users' freedom to use, modify and distribute it (e.g. creating derivative distributions etc.). See http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Overview for more info.

I can't yet speak specifically to how this all relates to Fedora but we've been slowly thinking about our license. The current (OPL[1]) is defunct so we're looking for one that'll stick around and meet our needs. We've narrowed it down (through casual chat) to the following choices: GNU Free Documentation License: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl.html Creative Commons: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ We'd revise it, but: http://www.freebsd.org/copyright/freebsd-doc-license.html Other, or keep the current... Overall I'd say we prefer things fairly open (in the spirit of open source) but of course want to remain fully compatible with the PHP license. I'm fairly ignorant on the topic of licensing but fwiw think it's great that Fedora and others include the PHP manual. All advice welcome! Regards, Philip [1] http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/329