On Tue, Mar 22, 2022 at 12:25 PM Michal Schorm <mschorm(a)redhat.com> wrote:
Hello,
I'm trying to answer this question:
"Under which license are the contributions done to Fedora Project,
unless license is specified - and how make this clear to the
contributors (or whether we make this clear enough)".
The answer is _probably_ FPCA [1].
The FPCA basically says that there's a particular default license that
applies in cases where the contribution is not "covered by explicit
licensing terms that are conspicuous and readily discernible to
recipients." This does not spell out what "explicit",
"conspicuous"
and "readily discernible" actually mean, much as you haven't explained
what you mean by "specified". I would assert that the "unlicensed
contribution" scenario contemplated by the FPCA is actually going to
be fairly rare apart from the special case of spec files, which the
FPCA was particularly aimed at. In the typical case, a Fedora-related
project makes clear what the applicable license of a repository (or of
files within a repository) is/are, and under the "inbound=outbound"
convention, that will be understood to be the license of the
contribution.
I'm not aware of any reason to make anything clearer that it currently
is. I think at this point the FPCA is sort of a historical curiosity
that lives on because of inertia (other than as an indirect statement
of licensing policy around certain special things like spec files but
those could be addressed in a different way).
And this HTTPS workflow leads back to my original question - since
FAS
users outside of 'packager' group AFAIK don't need to sign FPCA [1],
but can contribute a code - under which license or agreement it is
contributed ? If it is FPCA - are such contributors aware ?
If contributors haven't signed the FPCA, the FPCA doesn't apply to
their contributions. But this is most likely unproblematic, for much
the same reason that Fedora could abandon use of the FPCA altogether
without causing any significant problem.
Richard