On Tue, Aug 24, 2021 at 10:02:39PM -0400, Richard Fontana wrote:
Indeed, this should have been caught when the FPCA was updated to
reference CC BY-SA 4.0 as the default content license. The relevant
perceived problematic feature of CC BY-SA 3.0 Unported was fixed in CC
BY-SA 4.0.
That sounds like a clerical update rather than actually any policy change,
so presumably we can just make the edit without sending out new
announcements, etc?
I don't know if it is better to fix this error or to instead look
into
eliminating the FPCA requirement. The FPCA is now basically outdated
and has the detriment of being pointed to by certain CLA advocates as
proof that "Red Hat supports CLAs".
I think we should make the change. I agree about this detriment -- GitLab,
for example, erroneously called us out in their press release about adout
this, and when Neal attempted to correct them, first argued
"While FPCA may not be a typical CLA with regard to rights and
restrictions, this is not the only factor we looked into. We also were
looking into whether there were terms in general, other than commonly used
open source terms. Our analysis took into account that non-legal users do
not always understand the nuances of legal language and can be deterred by
any CLA, restrictive or not, if they do not understand the terms."
... before they eventually changed it. I know that some folks in the CentOS
project had this notion about Fedora requiring a CLA as well. At some point,
the downsides of perception outweigh any real benefits.
BUT THAT SAID: we have a lot of stuff in the project wired to the assumption
that the FPCA was agreed to. (And as another awful aside, we still call that
flag "CLA" pretty much everywhere.) Like, for example, voting. So all of
that would need to be addressed, making this at least A Project.
--
Matthew Miller
<mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader