User:Ianweller/Creative Commons press release

This stuff is totally a work in progress and you should help make it better. Thanks!

To send to press peeps
Fix the date in this before you send it out.

Raleigh, NC, USA - November XX, 2009 - The Fedora Project, a global community leading the advancement of free, open software and content, today finalized the conversion of the licensing of its documentation and wiki to a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License, also known as CC-BY-SA. This content was formerly licensed under the Open Publication License.

Every six months, the Fedora Project produces a new release of its Linux distribution, as well as a large amount of supporting documentation and content. Moving to CC-BY-SA allows for wider reach of this material as more people understand that they can share and remix it in the same ways they can share and remix the software included in Fedora.

In addition to the wiki, Fedora has produced nine guides for users and administrators of Fedora systems for the Fedora 12 release.

"Migrating to the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License will increase interoperability between projects, so we can share our work more easily," said Ian Weller, who oversees wiki administration for the Fedora Project. "Based on our mission to free and spread our content, it just makes sense."

Mike Linksvayer, vice president of Creative Commons Corporation, said, "The Fedora Project's move to CC BY-SA for its documentation and wiki demonstrates its leadership in free, open software and content and shows that Wikipedia's migration to the same license this summer was the beginning of much greater interoperability across the free world, not merely an end in itself."

Fedora is a Linux-based operating system built by a global community that showcases the latest in free and open source software. Fedora is always free for anyone to use, modify, and distribute. The Fedora Project is open and anyone is welcome to join. For more information on Fedora, to download the distribution or to join this community effort, please visit: http://fedoraproject.org/



To send to fedora-announce-list (as well as CC)
Today, the Docs team finalized the conversion of the licensing of our documentation and project content from the Open Publication License (OPL) to a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). Docs originally reached a consensus to change the license in June 2009, and after answering questions raised by the community, the Docs team decided to go ahead with the transition.

While OPL is a free and open documentation license, moving to a more widely known and adopted license and the one used by the likes of Wikipedia and GNOME Project helps us share our content more easily with the rest of the Free software community.

Additional information can be found at: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Relicensing_OPL_to_CC_BY_SA

We'd like to thank Tom 'spot' Callaway, Fedora's legal ninja, and Richard Fontana of Red Hat Legal for their help with the conversion. We look forward to continue working with the community and share our documentation freely.