Fedora website, Red Hat, copyright notices and FPCA

[Jon Stanley]

On Mon, Jun 27, 2011 at 10:05 PM, Rahul Sundaram <metherid at gmail.com> wrote:

> Here is a question for you.   If
> Fedora design team accepted any contributions licensed under CC-BY-SA
> and dropped the necessity of FPCA and the warning at the top of
>
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_connect_to_the_design_team_sparkleshare
>
> Do you honestly believe that we will lower the barrier to entry or
> not?   I would submit that this is indeed the case and FPCA serves no
> purpose here.

No, there's already a high barrier to entry there - you have to have a
FAS account. Clicking a few more times to sign the FPCA is not going
to lose us contributors that are willing to get a FAS account in order
to be able to connect (not only that, you need an SSH key, and to set
up an ssh config file, my oh my - quite a lot to ask of a designer who
probably has never heard of either of those things before)  Again, if
you've found such a living, breathing person, I'd be happy to hear
about it.

Two more questions for you to think about:

1) When's the last time that you saw a (non-upstream) contribution
carry an explicit license? That requirement would be *much* more
onerous than simply having a FPCA that declares a default license for
unlicensed code/content.
2) Semi-seriously, along the same lines, under what license is this
(or any other) e-mail thread? I don't believe that I've ever seen an
explicit license called out on an e-mail before. Thanks to the FPCA, I
can reasonably believe that it's CC-BY-SA supplemented by Moral Rights
Clause Waiver and GPL Relicensing Permission. Without the FPCA, I'd
have no choice but to assume that it was non-free.