Fedora Board Recap 07-06-2011

Jon Stanley jonstanley at gmail.com
Wed Jul 6 18:22:46 UTC 2011


https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Meeting:Board_meeting_2011-07-06

* Secretary: Jon Stanley
* Meeting type: Phone

== Attendence ==
=== Present ===
* Jared Smith
* Jon Stanley
* Guillermo Gómez
* Peter Robinson
* Rex Dieter
* Rudi Landmann
* Tom Callaway (Invited guest)
* Joerg Simon (late and gobby only)
* Toshio Kuratomi (late)

=== Not Present ===
* Jaroslav Reznik


=== Regards ===
* David Nalley

== Agenda ==
Updates
Board business

=== Updates ===
* Welcome to new members of the Board
** Welcome to the first phone meetings
** Meetings every week (can discuss today)
*** Alternating phone/IRC meeting
** Send agenda items to jsmith or board-private
* Fedora 16 Schedule
** Feature freeze on 7/26 (about 3 weeks out)
** Feature submission deadline 7/12
**Custom spins submission deadline 7/12
** key tasks at
http://rbergero.fedorapeople.org/schedules/f-16/f-16-key-tasks.html
** Schedule at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/16/Schedule
* Update on FUDCon {EMEA/APAC/NA} status
** Working on coming up with a list of tickets that should be opened
for any FUDCon to make it easier to keep track of
** EMEA in Milan on 9/30-10/2
*** Planning going well
** APAC - decision is imminently forthcoming,
*** Opening bid for next year as soon as this year's decision is
announced (schedule is to do Mar-May next year, in Red Hat fiscal Q1)
** FUDCon NA Jan 13-15 in Blacksburg, VA.
*** planning meetings start today
** Possible FAD to evaluate FUDCon planning process (after a FUDCon)?

=== Board Business ===
* FPCA discussion (with Tom Callaway as an invited guest)
** When Fedora got started, CLA (specifically Apache CLA) was mandated
by Red Hat.
** Interpretation worked for most people, however the text was very confusing
** Spot started working on a replacement, working with Red Hat Legal to draft
** Allow explicit licensing, but have a safety net license
*** by agreeing to FPCA, you give permission to use under default
license IF UNLICENSED otherwise.
** FPCA was not mandated by Red Hat Legal (and significant staffing
changes since CLA was mandated)
** Having a default licensing agreement makes sense, don't want to go
towards copyright assignment
** Other projects have similar agreements, for example Asterisk.
** the hope when the FPCA was crafted was having something legally
valid, but still understandable
** For the most part, positive feedback from FPCA
** Reached out to people that found the CLA objectionable, universally
they had no issues with the FPCA.
** Requiring explicit licensing is a bearucratic nightmare
*** Would have to build mechanisms to block non-explicitly licensed content.
** Where do you put/how to check license files in say, JPEG files?
** We would have to build gates around every possible area of contribution
** Seems the objection to the FPCA is not that they don't want to sign
the FPCA but that it's "hard" to sign the FPCA
*** Would it be better to address those specific usability problems?
** i18n of FAS/FPCA
** To be clear, none of the solutions we are evaluating would allow
unlicensed contributions to Fedora
*** In the US, at least, there's only minimal rights associated with
things that have no license, therefore, we would be on shakey legal
grounds if we accepted contributions without license terms
** Third parties have approached us that were not comfortable
contributing to Fedora with either the CLA or no agreement in place,
however, they were comfortable with the FPCA.

PROPOSAL: Do we drop FPCA as being mandatory in favor of explicit
licensing of all contributions?
* Board unanimously votes against the proposal.

=== Other notes ===
* Next meeting: Public IRC meeting on Wednesday, July 13th
** Need to figure out meeting time
** We'll ask FPC to re-visit their schedule, and if they don't feel
like moving, we'll find another time


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