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Copyright clarification #10

Open funnelfiasco opened 4 years ago

funnelfiasco commented 4 years ago

I didn't really notice until just now, but we're saying that the copyright for this work is owned by Red Hat. The implication is that contributors are assigning copyright to Red Hat. This is not explicitly stated anywhere.

So we should be clear about what's happening with copyright here.

  1. Are contributors, in fact, assigning copyright to Red Hat?
  2. If so, do contributors retain any rights?
  3. If not, are they licensing it to Red Hat?

If contributors are not assigning copyright, we should change the copyright statement to "Copyright Red Hat and contributors" or something. We should also be explicit that contributions are accepted under CC BY-SA 4.0. "inbound==outbound" is generally a good rule for community projects like this.

(This is probably a broader governance question for the project, but now is when I noticed it, so I'm opening the issue here :smile: )

semioticrobotic commented 4 years ago

Thanks very much for raising this, @funnelfiasco. I know we've been meaning to have a general licensing conversation for several months now, so this is the perfect case to begin refining our specific approach.

I'll begin just by making two notes clear:

  1. Red Hat has no interest in profiting from the sale of contributors' work here, and
  2. Red Hat has no interest in prohibiting contributors from reusing and republishing their work if they choose

We aim to comply with the licensing terms set forth by Opensource.com, as historically that's been where we've sourced pre-existing work (and channeled new work). When assigning copyright for the book-length collections, I've always designated Red Hat as a copyright holder because, well, I figured that's the entity with the greatest resources for resolving conflicts or addressing concerns that might arise from possible cases of misuse.

I agree that adding "and contributors" to the copyright declaration in the books is a great way to reinforce the fact that contributors are free to reuse and repurpose their work without Red Hat's permission. And to clarify even further, we will update our LICENSE.md to include specific language about our expectations for accepting contributions (CC BY-SA 4.0). You'll see those changes propagate in a few forthcoming merges, and if they still raise concerns for you, I hope you'll speak up again to continue the conversation so we can get it all sorted.

semioticrobotic commented 4 years ago

(As above: Transferring this issue to the governance repository to facilitate longer-term discussion of project licensing and copyright decisions.)