Fedora website, Red Hat, copyright notices and FPCA

[Rahul Sundaram]

bOn 06/28/2011 12:37 PM, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
>> 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.

It was from a discussion earlier in identi.ca.  I will let him answer
this here. 

> OTOH, the Fedora Board isn't really interested in pestering Red Hat legal
> every year to say "Has this changed?"

No but before accepting something,  Fedora Boards needs to carefully
evaluate what the other options are.  Since you mentioned historical
perspective,  GPG signing was originally suggested.  Since it became
cumbersome,  someone went back and asked about this and we found a
different way to manage this which was easier.  

>  
>> 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.

Not really.  If you are patching upstream code,  pick the same license
as upstream.  I don't see how this is messy. 

> You leave off the main counter point -- that if we depended on explicit
> licenses, then we couldn't accept contributions without specific licenses.

IMO,  this is a major advantage.  We shouldn't be accepting
(copyrightable) contributions without a explicit license.  Jon Stanley
implied that FPCA applies to my emails and I didn't really want it to
be.   FPCA could be interpreted to apply to my emails even though I
hadn't thought about it.  This is precisely the problem with a catch all
agreement. 

> 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 contributiouns 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.

All three were separate points but yes, I would like Fedora Board to ask
Red Hat legal what is the criteria and we should be able to figure out
where if we can drop the FPCA requirement or carve out the boundaries
better.  Accepting contributions willy nilly is never necessary and I
dislike the implication that this is my suggestion. 

Rahul