Fedora website, Red Hat, copyright notices and FPCA

[Richard Fontana]

On Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 01:43:00PM -0400, Tom Callaway wrote:
> On 06/30/2011 12:52 PM, Richard Fontana wrote:
> >   If You are not the copyright holder of a given Contribution that You
> >   wish to Submit to Fedora (for example, if Your employer or
> >   university holds copyright in it), it is Your responsibility to
> >   first obtain authorization from the copyright holder to Submit the
> >   Contribution under the terms of this FPCA on behalf of, or otherwise
> >   with the permission of, that copyright holder.  One form of such
> >   authorization is for the copyright holder to place, or permit You to
> >   place, an Acceptable License For Fedora on the Contribution.
> > 
> > So it addresses the issue of works made for hire and such, in the
> > gentlest possible way. But it only applies to 'Contributions' - the
> > original creative things that *You* the Contributor personally
> > created. It does not refer to anything else.  
> 
> I'm not sure I entirely agree with that, to be honest. I think the case
> where a Fedora Contributor packages up an explicitly licensed piece of
> code falls within this case. 

No, except to the extent that the Fedora contributor created some
copyrightable material in doing so. Taking someone else's patch from
Bugzilla does not come under that definition. 

Section 1 could have been written to say "If you are not the copyright
holder of a given Work...", clashing awkwardly with the document's
otherwise exclusive focus on the subset of Works that are capital-C
Contributions, but it intentionally was not written that way. It
instead refers to the narrower concept of capital-C Contributions. We
talked about this. We argued about this. It is likely that much of
this discussion took place in person but I can possibly produce
emails. :-)

>I do agree that it doesn't grant any sort
> of licensing permission on an unlicensed work, but it does advise how
> such a work could be brought under the FPCA.

No, it refers only to capital-C Contributions. The definition of
capital-C Contribution doesn't include any explicitly licensed code
written by anyone else. Everything that is not a capital-C
Contribution is outside scope. Remember that confusion and
unintentional FUD regarding that issue was one of the main flaws of
the old Fedora CLA. 

It doesn't really matter anyway. You aren't getting any magical legal
benefit from the inclusion of Section 1. Section 1 is mainly an
advisory or educational statement, and also, I suppose, a consequence
of your own design feature that you wanted the FPCA to be signed once
by individual human contributors. The broader statement you seem to
want to make is probably best made in some external document like a
FAQ for contributors or something.

- RF