Fedora website, Red Hat, copyright notices and FPCA

Richard Fontana rfontana at redhat.com
Wed Jun 29 16:09:45 UTC 2011


On Wed, Jun 29, 2011 at 09:10:23PM +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> On 06/29/2011 08:26 PM, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> > Right.  I'm not arguing with you that the FPCA does not cover this.  I'm
> > asking, do we want to move away from relying on good faith (current
> > practice) to forcing maintainers to hunt down license information when they
> > do this?
> 
> Nope. I am only suggesting explicit licensing as a alternative where we
> rely on FPCA default license now.  

Just my opinion: This is probably not practical. Non-explicit
licensing is a deeply embedded practice in free software development
culture and may even be essential to its efficient operation in many
cases. In some ways the FPCA may have the effect of nudging people
towards thinking about the benefits of explicit licensing, which may
be a good thing overall. But to attempt to mandate it at this point in
history would be either completely ineffective or disastrous.

There might be specific categories of contributions where your
suggestion could work, though. I might be misunderstanding it too.

- RF


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