Fedora website, Red Hat, copyright notices and FPCA

[Adam Williamson]

On Thu, 2011-06-30 at 02:18 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:

> Other distributions seems to get along just fine without a FPCA type
> agreement.  Canonical has a disastrously bad CLA but openSUSE,
> Mandriva,  Mageia etc seem to have no contributor agreements afaik.  I
> am leaving out non corporate affliated distros as I assume they aren't
> in the same position. 

I wouldn't be comfortable citing Mandriva as a good precedent here...to
be frank, having worked for both MDV and Red Hat, my personal take is
that RH is a far better-managed company. At least while I was there, MDV
had a rather lackadaisical approach to a lot of things, especially legal
issues. It used to have no licensing policy worth the name at all, until
I introduced one based entirely on Fedora's. It's shipped MP3 decoding -
in a product with commercial variants that are sold to the United States
- for years, on no safer legal ground than 'well, Fraunhofer didn't sue
us yet'. It contained quite a few packages with files that were not
redistributable (e.g. Microsoft-owned fonts and DLLs) for a long time,
until I went through and weeded out most of them.

In short, Red Hat / Fedora copying Mandriva's approach to legal
responsibilities would be precisely the wrong way around, at least IMO
=)

I don't know much about SUSE, so can't comment there. Mageia, so far, is
not corporate-affiliated.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net