Fedora website, Red Hat, copyright notices and FPCA

Rahul Sundaram metherid at gmail.com
Tue Jun 28 02:47:29 UTC 2011


On 06/28/2011 08:03 AM, Jon Stanley wrote:
> No, there's already a high barrier to entry there - you have to have a
> FAS account.

Sorry but why?   If someone submits content under CC-BY-SA for say,
supplementary wallpapers, there is no need for a FAS account.   Fedora
Design goes out and looks for good content under CC-BY-SA and does
package them or use them as the basis for their work.  Just because
someone submits it themselves, the rules shouldn't be any different. 

> Two more questions for you to think about:
>
> 1) When's the last time that you saw a (non-upstream) contribution
> carry an explicit license? That requirement would be *much* more
> onerous than simply having a FPCA that declares a default license for
> unlicensed code/content.

I have seen patches with a explicit license and there are good chances
that someone submitting a patch wouldn't have a FAS account and asking
them to get a FAS account and sign the FPCA before you accept the patch
is a lot more onerous than just asking them to slap a explicit license
on non-trivial patches. 

> 2) Semi-seriously, along the same lines, under what license is this
> (or any other) e-mail thread? I don't believe that I've ever seen an
> explicit license called out on an e-mail before. Thanks to the FPCA, I
> can reasonably believe that it's CC-BY-SA supplemented by Moral Rights
> Clause Waiver and GPL Relicensing Permission. Without the FPCA, I'd
> have no choice but to assume that it was non-free.

My emails are not to be licensed under CC-BY-SA or GPL.  Neither are
suitable licenses for email.   I don't t think you need to consider it
non-free however since people sent emails all the time to public mailing
lists which are mirrored everywhere without a explicit license to do
so.  If FPCA allows you to use my emails under licenses which I don't
intend it to be used,  I consider it a net negative against it

Rahul


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