Fedora website, Red Hat, copyright notices and FPCA

[Jon Stanley]

On Mon, Jun 27, 2011 at 5:43 PM, Rahul Sundaram <metherid at gmail.com> wrote:

> I understand that.  Perhaps I should have been more clear.   Did the
> Board start with the assumption that FPCA is necessary and move on to
> discuss the implementation details or were the board members convinced
> that it was necessary and there is sufficient justification for it in
> the first place,  enough to get every contributor to sign it
> compulsorily?

I can say that we discussed the FPCA, many times, before it was made
compulsory. I don't think that we saw a draft of it prior to the
community either - which was IIRC about 6-8 months of comment period
before it was finalized. During that time, I think that most all
questions were answered about it.

What I know was discussed was the reasoning for it, and the reason
that the CLA was inadequate. The CLA was, for better or worse, largely
modeled after the Apache CLA. The verbiage there works fine, so long
as you're contributing simply source code that forms a single unit of
software. It falls down a bit when what the contributions are is spec
files, documentation, etc.

One of the very real concerns that I'd heard about the old CLA is that
it would give Red Hat the right to re-license upstream source code
however it saw fit if the upstream maintainers were to sign it. Red
Hat would obviously have no legal right to do this, CLA or no CLA.
However, when I showed the person that had this concern a draft of the
FPCA, he said that his concerns were entirely alleviated by that
document.

One of my very specific questions in the last board IRC meeting was if
anyone was not signing the FPCA because of some issue with the text of
the document itself, rather than simply not being around/not reading
email/whatever. The answer that I got was that no one was aware of any
such person - if you are, I'd like to know about it.

Having gone through the FPCA signing process myself shortly after it
became available, I can tell you that the process to do so was not at
all onerous - in fact, it couldn't have been much easier.