[License-review] OSI, legal conditions outside the "four corners" of the license, and PD/CC 0 [was Re: Can OSI specify that public domain is open source?]

[Richard Fontana]

On Mon, Jan 02, 2012 at 01:37:51PM -0800, Luis Villa wrote:
> [Happy new year! Bringing this up again in part because Red Hat
> recently, and in my opinion correctly, reevaluated their position on
> public domain in Fedora:
> http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/announce/2011-December/003025.html]

Not that this detail is very important, but the way you phrased that
sounds wrong somehow (I think because "Red Hat" could mean multiple
things or multiple people). What I'd say is that Red Hat has developed
a legal position over time on how to deal with purported public domain
dedications, and historically the Fedora Project chose for principled
reasons to adopt a somewhat more conservative policy than the Red Hat
position would imply. However, Tom Callaway's recent statement
indicates a liberalization of Fedora Project legal policy that happens
to place it more in line with what I'd consider to be the Red Hat
legal position. 

- RF