Fedora website, Red Hat, copyright notices and FPCA

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Tue, Jun 28, 2011 at 02:25:55PM +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> bOn 06/28/2011 12:37 PM, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> >> My
> >> understanding is that,  Richard Fontana said this was not driven by Red
> >> Hat Legal but Fedora leadership and I am not sure, who this leadership
> >> is.
> >>
> > Could you point this out to me?  I see that he made those types of
> > statements about the Gilligan's Island copyright statement but not where he
> > made that statement about the FPCA.
> 
> It was from a discussion earlier in identi.ca.  I will let him answer
> this here. 
> 
I will await.

> > OTOH, the Fedora Board isn't really interested in pestering Red Hat legal
> > every year to say "Has this changed?"
> 
> No but before accepting something,  Fedora Boards needs to carefully
> evaluate what the other options are.  Since you mentioned historical
> perspective,  GPG signing was originally suggested.  Since it became
> cumbersome,  someone went back and asked about this and we found a
> different way to manage this which was easier.  
> 
And I said that the Board could begin to evaluate alternative methods of
signing the FPCA if the present method is deemed too cumbersome.  We agree
that there is historical record that that is something that we can do
(although we then have to pass the ideas we have up to legal to evaluate
whether it's okay or not).  There's a difference between that and whether
the FPCA is needed at all.

> >  
> >> a) everyone agrees that a explicit license is more clear and generally
> >> preferable
> > I don't think so about generally preferable.  Things get messy when you have
> > to specify an explicit license as different people would choose different
> > explicit licenses.
> 
> Not really.  If you are patching upstream code,  pick the same license
> as upstream.  I don't see how this is messy. 
> 
I've now replied in the other message with examples.

> > You leave off the main counter point -- that if we depended on explicit
> > licenses, then we couldn't accept contributions without specific licenses.
> 
> IMO,  this is a major advantage.  We shouldn't be accepting
> (copyrightable) contributions without a explicit license.  Jon Stanley
> implied that FPCA applies to my emails and I didn't really want it to
> be.   FPCA could be interpreted to apply to my emails even though I
> hadn't thought about it.  This is precisely the problem with a catch all
> agreement. 
> 
Nothing prevents you from adding an explicit license to all of your emails
now to prevent people from reusing your email except under fair use.  If
email stops being an acceptable source of changes to be applied towards our
packages/documentation/etc/though, that seems like a major wrench in the
works.

> > you'd like to ask Legal whether making people sign the FPCA is a requirement
> > from them and then tell the Board if Legal replies that as far as they're
> > concerned, Fedora could just accept contributiouns willy-nilly, then we could
> > revist then.  I do think it would be beneficial to you to keep this issue
> > separate from the other two as it is not as straightforward to answer even
> > if Red Hat Legal tells us it's okay.
> 
> All three were separate points but yes, I would like Fedora Board to ask
> Red Hat legal what is the criteria and we should be able to figure out
> where if we can drop the FPCA requirement or carve out the boundaries
> better.  Accepting contributions willy nilly is never necessary and I
> dislike the implication that this is my suggestion. 
> 
So, I consider it your responsibility to at least come up with the precise
question that you want to ask Red Hat Legal (and once you have that, it's
quicker for you to send it to the legal list than to give it to the Board
and then at their meeting, they assign someone to take it to Red Hat legal,
and then at their next meeting they ask if they've heard back from Legal.
And then they ask that the results be sent to the advisory-board-list, etc)
since you're the one who wants to make a change here.  Otherwise I might
pose the quesetion to Legal in a way that you later say is an irresponsible
representation of what you were really asking.  OTOH, the discussion of
a non-FPCA scenario is leading me closer to feeling that the FPCA is
a time-effective means to get acceptable licensing terms on contributions.
So if you wnat to assume that the requirement came from Legal at some point
but want to know if the Board would remove the requirement if Legal also
removed the requirement, then the Board could potentially make a decision
keep the FPCA requirement based on time-requirements rather than on the
legal situation... we wouldn't be able to make a decision to remove the FPCA
requirement without knowing the perspective from Legal.

-Toshio
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