Fedora Board Recap 07-06-2011

[Richard Fontana]

On Wed, Jul 06, 2011 at 02:22:46PM -0400, Jon Stanley wrote:
> ** FPCA was not mandated by Red Hat Legal (and significant staffing
> changes since CLA was mandated)
> ** Having a default licensing agreement makes sense, don't want to go
> towards copyright assignment
> ** Other projects have similar agreements, for example Asterisk.

Whoa. I object, if the Board is suggesting that the Asterisk agreement
bears any similarity to the FPCA.

The Asterisk contributor agreement seems to be this one, the "Digium
Open Source Software Project Submission Agreement v3.0":
https://issues.asterisk.org/view_license_agreement.php

It says:

  You hereby grant Digium a perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free,
  irrevocable, non-exclusive, and transferable license to use,
  reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly
  perform, distribute the Submissions, and to sublicense such rights
  to others. The rights granted may be exercised in any form or
  format, and Digium may distribute and sublicense to others on any
  licensing terms, including without limitation: (a) open source
  licenses like the GNU General Public License (GPL), or the Berkeley
  Science Division license (BSD); or (b) binary, proprietary, or
  commercial licenses. 

This is essentially like the *letter* of the old Fedora CLA, only it
is more straightforward, and, possibly an important difference, the
inbound rights explicitly go only to Digium. And unlike the old Fedora
CLA it would provide no basis for the interpretation of the latter
which saved it from utter fail (thank you spot). (It is also
disturbing in getting the expansion of "BSD" wrong but that's a minor
point.)  The Asterisk agreement is only nominally different from
copyright assignment.

I note it also goes on to say:

  If Your Submission is derived from software released by Digium under
  the GPL, Digium as licensor thereof waives such requirements of the
  GPL as applied to that software to the limited extent necessary to
  allow you to provide the Submission and the foregoing license to
  Digium.

I am not sure what this means but I *think* this is a way of saying
"don't even *think* of arguing that you're licensing your
contributions in under the GPL to us just because we licensed software
to you under the GPL".

So, no, Fedora Board, the FPCA is not like the Asterisk contributor
agreement! 

 - RF