Fedora Board Recap 07-06-2011

[Matt Clark]

No, there's no such thing as an implicit license. A work is implicitly *
copyrighted* the moment it is written, and, by default, no one has a legal
"right" (differentiate from permission) to redistribute it, or produce
derived works from it (of course, the author might not mind, but that's
another matter entirely). In other words, lack of license is roughly the
same as "look but don't touch" license.

If something is "unlicensed but copyrighted" unless specified (as all
unlicensed material is as soon as it is written) then it is up to the
kindness of the author.  I wish it were simpler, too.

On Wed, Jul 6, 2011 at 4:48 PM, Richard Fontana <rfontana at redhat.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 07, 2011 at 12:49:11AM +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> > On 07/06/2011 11:52 PM, Jon Stanley wrote:
> > > *** In the US, at least, there's only minimal rights associated with
> > > things that have no license, therefore, we would be on shakey legal
> > > grounds if we accepted contributions without license terms
> >
> > Yet this routinely happens.  Patches contributed via bugzilla or ones
> > that contributors pick from mailing lists etc.
>
> I think there may be some confusion on this one particular
> point. Something can be licensed even if it doesn't have an explicit
> license notice on it. Implicit licensing is pervasive in free software
> development.
>
> We use the term of art "Unlicensed" in the FPCA, but, if you imagine a
> world where the FPCA isn't used *and* Rahul's mandatory explicit
> licensing alternative isn't adopted, Fedora contributions are still
> licensed even when they don't have license notices on them. And those
> Bugzilla patches or mailing list patches from non-FAS people are
> licensed too. In the FPCA, "Unlicensed" just means "doesn't have an
> explicit license notice"; it doesn't mean unlicensed.
>
> Arguably, a benefit of the FPCA is that in a large number of cases
> that might otherwise be governed by implicit licensing, there is an
> understanding that an explicit license has been granted by the
> contributor, so there is total clarity about the terms governing the
> contribution. I think that must be the point the Board was really
> trying to make. This may also lead to additional benefits which I have
> heard spot articulate. But most projects deal with implicit licensing
> to some degree or other, including Fedora.
>
> - RF
>
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