Fedora website, Red Hat, copyright notices and FPCA

[Richard Fontana]

On Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 11:56:30AM +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> However if we had a informal set of policies and someone picks up a
> spec file from Fedora and wants to reuse it outside Fedora, how
> would they know what rights they have? 

Under the old Fedora CLA regime, this was addressed in a Fedora legal
FAQ. Indeed that was the new FPCA in its germinal form. Fedora said
that the license of spec files was (by default, opt-outable by the
spec file creator) the broad inbound copyright license grant in the
CLA. Under the FPCA, the license is instead by default the MIT license
(with Fedora having discretion to decide how to translate its notice
requirements to this unorthodox context).

Is your concern that the MIT license doesn't actually appear at the
top of the spec file? 

> My goal in pushing towards
> explicit licensing is in part to make it more obvious what to do in
> such cases.  Is there a alternative?  

It is true that the FPCA itself doesn't provide the function of
notifying downstream users of what rights they have. Is that a big
problem? With spec files I've assumed it's not a big problem. My
understanding is that in the past there were other projects that
contacted Fedora because they weren't sure what their rights were
under spec files, hence the FAQ I referred to above. If it were some
sort of mass problem (Fedora Legal inbox flooded with inquiries about
the license of Fedora spec files) I think something would have to be
done (beyond what already exists), but I assume that has not been the
case.

I guess this is a Fedora Packaging issue, but could one automate the
inclusion of an MIT license notice in spec files? Fedora *does* have
to do something to comply with that aspect of the FPCA, though the
clause I'm referring to is there precisely because we didn't want to
have to include a copy of the MIT license in or adjacent to
everything. I was imagining some sort of centralized notice like "Code
(as defined at <>) is licensed under the following terms unless
otherwise indicated" followed by the text of the MIT license.

- RF