Fedora website, Red Hat, copyright notices and FPCA

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Tue, Jun 28, 2011 at 08:17:29AM +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> 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. 
> 
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_connect_to_the_design_team_sparkleshare#Pre-Requisites

You're pointing at the page and talking about people getting access to the
designteam sparkleshare specifically.  To get access to sparkleshare the
person needs to have a FAS account.


> > 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. 
> 
Depends on what you mean.  If you're talking about bugzilla you may be
correct.  But currently, as you point out we don't require you to do either
of those in bugzilla.  So if you propose that people do this in bugzilla,
you're imposing an additional burden.

If you're tlaking about patches that are being checked into the Fedora
package repository then my experience is that you're wrong in the majority
of cases.  All of those patches are currently being committed by people who
have signed the FPCA exactly once (they may have signed both the CLA and the
FPCA so in that respect you could consider that they've signed things
exactly twice).  OTOH, if you take away the FPCA and then demand that they
put an explicit license on all of their patches, then you're expecting them
to do the work of generating the license boilerplate for every single patch
that they create and check in.

-Toshio
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