Karsten Wade gibt bekannt, dass das Fedora Project plant, sich von der mittlerweile veralteten OPL zu verabschieden und die Inhalte stattdessen unter eine CC-BY-SA 3.0-Lizenz zu stellen.

Von der Änderung betroffen sein wird das Fedora-Wiki, die Fedo…

My concern about going in the direction of “get permission from everyone” is that we either have to do the whole thing to be successful. For example, should I email every single Fedora list to make sure everyone hears about the change? If I start with just a few lists, aren’t the others left out?

This is a case where consensus rules actually work better. We make lots of noise that this is in the works, we give people venues to discuss it, we tweak plans in whatever way is necessary to keep consensus, and we go ahead on schedule.

Maybe I’m wrong. I know Wikipedia threw together a vote of some kind. It is certainly feasible to setup a two-week vote for anyone with a signed CLA.

But what happens if the majority says “NO”?

This is a case where, for the present and future good of the project, we need to do what is right. This is where the meritocracy comes in. The people who think and understand these issues pretty thoroughly are also in the position to advise and decide. And we all did.

And although it is impractical to get everyone’s agreement (hence why the clause of the CLA is even there), maybe there’s a way to get a quick consensus just to show that the body of contributors as a whole is mostly in agreement? Maybe throw together a quick “election” and then when we flip the switch, we can also say that a body of our contributors also approved, even though we didn’t have to get that approval? Or maybe that’s just making things worse. Dunno.

I like your analogy of moving off the archipelago and onto the great continent. We make such a point of doing so in our code work that it only makes sense to carry the same principles into our other content areas. Note that the Design team has done this for quite some time — and interestingly, if we *didn’t* change, it would be well-nigh impossible, or at least very daunting, to use CC BY-SA art in our publications!

One small niggle: I think casting the relicensing (“sublicensing” is a really weird term, honestly) clause as a nuclear option may be a bit inflammatory. But the point remains that we’ve all agreed to the CLA with the understanding that we want our contributions to Fedora to remain free, now and always. Moving to a CC license adheres directly to that intention; it also clears the way for us to be *freer*, and share more readily with others, which is also a stated goal of Fedora — not just to build great things, but to ensure they are not sequestered from others who can make use of them.

Bravo on a good blog post, and I fully support this move.