Fedora website, Red Hat, copyright notices and FPCA

[Richard Fontana]

On Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 02:18:11AM +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> On 06/29/2011 09:39 PM, Richard Fontana wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> Other distributions seems to get along just fine without a FPCA type
> agreement.  Canonical has a disastrously bad CLA 

Copyright assignment agreement, to be more precise, though many things
called CLAs are quite similar.

> but openSUSE,
> Mandriva,  Mageia etc seem to have no contributor agreements afaik.  I
> am leaving out non corporate affliated distros as I assume they aren't
> in the same position. 

I wouldn't assume the practices of those other distros are not
relevant or helpful to know about (regardless of whatever affiliation
may or may not exist). I think they are highly relevant.

But anyway, I am concerned that three different issues are being mixed
up here:

1) Should a distro project have some sort of contributor agreement?

2) Should a distro project specifically have an agreement like the FPCA?

3) Should a distro project mandate an explicit licensing policy?

As to 1) the answer is clearly 'not necessarily'. Most free software
projects do not use contributor agreements, and no one has yet
convinced me that there is something special about distro projects
that make them more (rather than less) appropriate in that setting.

As to 2), I am not surprised that Fedora is the only distro project
that uses an agreement like the FPCA, because (as far as I know)
nothing like the FPCA has ever been used before (except in the sense
that in its latter days the Fedora CLA was interpreted in a way that
was somewhat like the FPCA).

As to 3), that was what I was addressing in my previous message. The
choice is not necessarily between having some sort of contributor
agreement and having an explicit licensing policy. I believe a
mandatory explicit licensing policy is generally impractical, although
I think there may be some projects that have attempted to implement
such policies to some degree. (The likely correctness of this
intuition with respect to Fedora has been confirmed to me to my
satisfaction in recent conversations I've had with Tom Callaway.)

> Let's get specific then.    I suggest explicit licensing for all Fedora
> content including website and documentation.   All spec files and
> kickstart files.  I am sure one could find corner cases here and I could
> equally well point out things that FPCA doesn't cover but I would like
> to know if this leaves out anything major that the FPCA does cover

I don't think this would generally work. What I think might work is a
set of informal domain-specific default licensing policies as an
alternative to, or supplement to, the FPCA. I think you could argue
that that's in effect what is in place already for Fedora
documentation, and you could also argue that it is implemented in part
using explicit licensing.

- RF