Fedora website, Red Hat, copyright notices and FPCA

[Rahul Sundaram]

On 06/27/2011 11:04 PM, Tom Callaway wrote:
> It boils down to "Red Hat is the parent and primary sponsor of this
> community

I think that fact is already established in the footer making the splash
completely redundant.

> For documentation, this should be straightforward, just keep track
> within the documentation itself, perhaps on the title page or in an
> appendix.

It is not straight forward anywhere I am afraid.  Currently docs just
ignores the authors who have written down the content via the wiki and I
happen to do it only via the wiki ever since I started getting involved
in the docs project.  If they really want to start attributing that,  it
gets really tricky.   For instance, do we credit someone who just fixed
one single typo at the same level to someone who wrote most of a beat?  

> Alternately, because of how the Berne Convention works, there is no
> requirement to list out Copyright attributions like this,

I am perfectly fine with no copyright notice.  Only mentioning Red Hat
and putting everyone else into the "others" bucket is really really
unfair especially in cases where Red Hat is not involved in anyway. 
Ex:  a guide written entirely by volunteers. 

> In the entire CLA->FPCA process, I can count on one hand the number of
> Fedora contributors who felt that the FPCA was confusing or unclear, and
> I'd still have fingers left. So, I am not ignoring your "fact", but
> rather, confronting it as an opinion, which I do not agree with, nor do
> I feel you have any significant evidence to support it.

Depends on what you count.  I know how many questions were directly in
various places about the implications of the FPCA.  It is not that the
FPCA itself is confusing but to give a specific example,  the fact that
one could very well submit patches via bugzilla without having to sign
the FPCA and noone will be opposed to merging it in as long as the
license is clear is not evident from it.   How is anyone copying a spec
file from Fedora supposed to understand it is under the MIT license? 
That is confusing as well.   I could go on but these are sufficient to
make the case for explicit licensing. 

> I agree that explicit licensing is a better option, and I do wish to
> encourage it, but I do not wish to build procedure and red tape around
> it, when we can be sure that we have what we need for Fedora in a
> one-time FPCA agreement.

FPCA itself is just procedure and red tape for people who just want to
submit one background to the design team.  The larger community
understands CC-BY-SA far better than FPCA might a advantage for
established contributors but isn't helpful at all for people just
getting started.  "Warning:  Must sign FPCA"  certainly looks like red
tape to me.   Fedora cares about licensing very much.  Package
maintainers have to understand already quite a bit about it.  The pain
of educating people is the price of the licensing clarity we want to
establish in this project.  For someone who already has to check through
every source file for license notices and intricacies and complexities
of license compatibility etc,  listing the license explicitly in the
spec file or kickstart file is hardly ground breaking.  Docs already has
clear licensing.   Design team can accept contributions under
CC-BY-SA.    The advantages of a implicit license is dubious.  I would
even say, it encourages people to ignore licensing issues which are key
to sustaining the freedom of Fedora and is dangerous to encourage.   
Educating the Fedora community about legal issues is a painful process. 
As someone who has explained MP3 patent issues over and over and over
again, I fully understand the wish to avoid such pain but it is critical
and necessary for us to continue to  do so.   Implicit license is a
gimmick.   I reject the notion that it is necessary.  We will be better
without it IMO. 

Rahul