Fedora website, Red Hat, copyright notices and FPCA

[Tom Callaway]

On 06/24/2011 07:45 AM, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> Hi
> 
> There was a discussion in identi.ca earlier ( for context, 
> https://identi.ca/conversation/71981654#notice-74661045) with Richard
> Fontana,  Maureen Duffy and others about a few things in the
> fedoraproject.org website and I am following up here because it seems to
> be a project level decision. 
> 
> a)  Has a prominent splash "A  Red Hat Community Project" and it is not
> clear what means.  If it merely means Red Hat is the primary sponsor,
> that seems redundant with the notice in the bottom.  Can this be
> clarified or removed?

Red Hat really likes that splash. I would prefer it remain.

> b)  Has a copyright notice,  "Red Hat, Inc and others" and that divides
> the community into Red Hat vs others.  Since Red Hat doesn't have any
> copyright ownership over Fedora.  Why not just (c) Fedora Project
> contributors ?  Also refer to

Please note that the "Fedora Project" is not a legal entity, and I am
not sure that it can claim to hold copyright on anything. I would rather
see some sort of list of copyright holders, or rather, something like:

This page was created by the Fedora Community. A full list of copyright
holders can be found here: https://foo.bar/

The problem with that approach is that tracking it is... fun. Which is
why we've defaulted to "(C) Red Hat, Inc and others" for so long, on the
grounds that interested parties who want the details of "others" could
contact Red Hat, Inc, not to "Mary Anne" the non-Red Hat copyright holders.

> c)  FPCA is certainly a much better replacement for the legal agreement
> than the CLA was but I am not convinced that any type of contributor
> agreement is required at all and still causes confusion and debates. For
> example,  I don't see why anyone submitting content for the design team
> under CC-BY-SA has to sign the FPCA as per the warning on top at
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_connect_to_the_design_team_sparkleshare.
>   For anything that is copyrightable, a requirement of a explicit
> license seems to be a better choice.  In the case of things like spec
> files and kickstart files,  one could have a copyright notice on each of
> them similar to what openSUSE and others seem to have done already.  The
> choice of a permissive license such as MIT or the same license as the
> component if it is a upstream codebase would avoid the necessity to have
> a "default license".  I assumed when it was originally proposed that
> this was a Red Hat Legal requirement and didn't oppose it when it was
> originally proposed but I am not sure it is
> (https://identi.ca/notice/73733284).    So,  who is driving this and why?

I'm happy to have a larger discussion on this topic, but I think it is
important for there to be a "safety net" to ensure that contributions
made to Fedora are always under a Free License. I do not feel that
requiring that contributors agree to the FPCA is a confusing choice.

In addition, requiring an explicit license seems like a much more
confusing option in most situations (especially ones where there is not
an established upstream default). I do not look forward to an INBOX full
of "What license should I choose for this contribution?". I think it is
far more likely that people will ignore this requirement (as there is no
good way to enforce it) and upload files without proper licensing, only
to have us discover 5 years later that we do not have licensing
permission on that contribution, and be in a situation where the
contributor decides they want to play games with the license.

I think our approach is a lot cleaner and simpler than the openSUSE
approach, and since FAS authentication is necessary for practically
every sort of copyrightable contribution to Fedora, FPCA agreement on a
per account basis seems like the cleanest fit.

~tom

==
Fedora Project