Fedora website, Red Hat, copyright notices and FPCA

Tue Jun 28 07:07:39 UTC 2011

On Tue, Jun 28, 2011 at 07:22:38AM +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> On 06/28/2011 06:40 AM, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> > The FPCA was first discussed with the Board before I was on it.  My
> > recollection of that time period (from an outsiders perspective) was that
> > spot presented the problems with the CLA and gave the FPCA text as
> > a replacement that Red Hat Legal would like us to replace it with.
> >
> > If that's an accurate reflection, then the underlying assumption that the
> > text was needed at all would not have been challenged.
> 
> Precisely but my question on who is driving this change remains
> unanswered, I am not sure this is the case.  This mail talks about Red
> Hat Legal,  Fedora Legal and Spot seemingly interchangeably and it is
> not clear to me,  who FPCA is supposed to be serving.

Sorry-- I tried to clearly say spot and Red Hat Legal and avoid the use of
Fedora Legal.  Red Hat Legal are the people hirerd by Red Hat to handle
legal issues for them who sometimes tell us there's things we must do and
other times help us out with answers to legal issues we don't understand.
Spot is a single person who acts as a liason between us and Red Hat Legal
many times and a storehouse of information from past discussions with Red
Hat Legal.  Fedora Legal is an ambiguous term that could refer to spot or to
Red Hat Legal or the fedora legal mailing list.  Often spot and Red Hat
legal can be used interchangably because spot is the gateway for us to
contact and receive guidance from Red Hat Legal.  However, in this thread
Richard Fonatana and spot have made statements which are not always in line
with each other and therefore I tried to name both of them so that they
would not be used interchangably in this mail.

> My
> understanding is that,  Richard Fontana said this was not driven by Red
> Hat Legal but Fedora leadership and I am not sure, who this leadership
> is.
>
Could you point this out to me?  I see that he made those types of
statements about the Gilligan's Island copyright statement but not where he
made that statement about the FPCA.

> The Fedora Board has been presented a text and like me,  they
> have assumed that this text is needed and driven by Red Hat Legal and
> looked at the implementation of it.  On the face of it, this is a
> reasonable assumption but I do question whether this is really what
> happened. 
> 
> > However, the  assumption that a text like the FPCA was needed at all was 
> > a subject for consideration when the CLA itself was debated as being needed,
> > what constituted "signing" the agreement, etc.  This would have been many
> > years ago and lasted for some time -- starting with the fax in CLA,
> > progressing through gpg signing, the idea of click through agreement for the
> > wiki, form-based signing in FAS, etc.
> 
> Sure.  A lot of things were advised earlier and changed entirely.  Red
> Hat Legal used to strongly prefer OPL but that seems not to be case
> anymore.   The historical perspectives are useful and I am aware of them
> but instead of just referring to Red Hat Legal,  Fedora Board needs to
> ask,  what is the justification for FPCA and does it serves Fedora's
> needs currently.    This isn't a purely legal matter but also a matter
> of policy since it is in the best interest of Fedora ( but not
> necessarily Red Hat Legal's concern) to lower the barrier to entries to
> Fedora whenever possible.    
> 
OTOH, the Fedora Board isn't really interested in pestering Red Hat legal
every year to say "Has this changed?"

> > a) prominent splash "A Red Hat Community Project".  It seems that this is
> > more marketing/PR/a proper acknowledgment of who is supporting us than
> > a legal issue.  So the Board probably can consider changing this without
> > spot and Red Hat Legal input.  OTOH, I liked the clarification questions
> > that Richard Fontana asked here:
> > http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/advisory-board/2011-June/010787.html
> >
> > so it could be good to get a little more dialog there and then present to
> > the Board.
> 
> Agreed
> 
> > b) Copyright notice,  "Red Hat, Inc and others" => "Fedora Project
> > Contributors": From the docs list conversation and Richard Fontana's post on
> > this list, it seems fine to change this (and the intent the rewording
> > expresses is something I like).  spot seems to have reservations, however.
> > The best outcome would be for spot and rfontana to talk about this and present
> > their opinion on changing to the Board.  Alternately, the Board could
> > directly request that spot ask Red Hat Legal if they agree with us changing
> > the wording on the Fedora Websites.
> 
> Agreed.  I think either (c) Fedora Project contributors or no copyright
> notice at all is preferable to the current notice.  
> 
> > c) whether the FPCA needs to be signed to contribute to docs/design
> > team/etc.  I haven't read anything from Red Hat Legal saying that this
> > isn't a good idea to keep enforcing. 
> 
> As I have highlighted above,  it is not clear to me that this advise was
> driven by Red Hat Legal.  Are you sure about this?  I would note this
> doesn't really address any of the concerns I raised about this issue
> either.    To summarise the main points:
> 
> a) everyone agrees that a explicit license is more clear and generally
> preferable

I don't think so about generally preferable.  Things get messy when you have
to specify an explicit license as different people would choose different
explicit licenses.

> a)  If there is a explicit license already in place,  FPCA is
> superfluous layer and not needed. 
> c) If spec files, kickstart files etc were already under a explicit like
> like MIT (similar to openSUSE spec files),  anyone who wants to reuse
> has a clear knowledge of the rights granted.  FPCA hides this
> d)  Fedora contributors already deal with licensing on a regular basis (
> upstream code,  documentation, design content etc) and publishing a list
> of recommendations (c.f
> http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-recommendations.html)  to address
> common use cases will take care of the concern from Spot that a large
> number of questions would be raised if FPCA is dropped. 
> e) FPCA does not negate the need to educate contributors about licensing
> and it doesn't really simplify it much since any content has to be
> checked for originality etc
> f)  FPCA does not cover one off contributions like a patch submitted via
> bugzilla integrated into Fedora packages.   This can and does happen
> regularly and explicit license always as a matter of policy is much more
> safer
> 
You leave off the main counter point -- that if we depended on explicit
licenses, then we couldn't accept contributions without specific licenses.

Anyhow, you wanted to know whether it would be worthwhile to submit these
three issues for the Board to consider.  I think the first two are things
the Board could look at changing given the statements that Richard Fontana
has made.  Length of time to make a decision would depend on how clear we
think the statements have been and how much time we decide needs to be spent
gathering and clarifying any divergent opinions.  The last issue
I personally am not that interested in pursuing unless Red Hat  Legal were
to tell us something has changed on their side since I think the answer was
made satisfactorily historically and the only supporting argument that you
make that I can really get behind is lowering the barrier if we can..  If
you'd like to ask Legal whether making people sign the FPCA is a requirement
from them and then tell the Board if Legal replies that as far as they're
concerned, Fedora could just accept contributions willy-nilly, then we could
revist then.  I do think it would be beneficial to you to keep this issue
separate from the other two as it is not as straightforward to answer even
if Red Hat Legal tells us it's okay.

-Toshio
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