Fedora website, Red Hat, copyright notices and FPCA

[Rahul Sundaram]

On 06/28/2011 01:47 AM, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:

> I think you are overblowing it by a bit. Here are the steps that would
> be needed:
>
> 1) Person A makes a background, image, mp3, etc.
> 2) Person B who has signed the FPCA vets the item and makes sure its
> license and content is ok (it doesn't rip off something, etc etc)
> 3) Person B submits it for Fedora.
> 4) Person B deals with issues with item and reports them to Person A
> if A wants to know.
>
> Which is 1:1 with packaging
>
> 1) Person A makes a program
> 2) Person B who has signed the FPCA vets, makes a spec file,etc etc
> 3) Person B submits it for Fedora
> 4) Person B deals with bugreports by either fixing them or reporting
> them upstream.
>
> The most important reason for doing this is to make sure that the core
> is being maintained by committed and invested people.

In case, it wasn't clear,  my point wasn't that submitting artwork is
more problematic than packaging but that FPCA is superfluous in both
cases and a warning like the one in
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_connect_to_the_design_team_sparkleshare
is not helpful or welcoming  when there is a explicit license like
CC-BY-SA attached to them which is perfectly acceptable.  In either
case, someone has to check the license and make sure the content or code
is acceptable for Fedora.   FPCA doesn't help much.

The only case where FPCA can partially help is if someone who has signed
FPCA submits content or code which is not otherwise explicitly license
and IMO,  it is better to just get it under a explicit license in that
case instead of relying on the FPCA.   Always having a explicit license
makes it more obvious for someone who wants to reuse it,  outside the
project.   Ex:  Fedora wallpapers get packaged by other distros or
Fedora spec files getting used by other distros.

I think I made my points clear as best as I could.  I don't know if FPCA
was really voted on or considered by the Fedora Board before  but I
would like to reiterate that if there is interest from Fedora Board in
reconsidering the use of FPCA,  I would be happy to submit a proposal on
how to accomplish this in more detail but I don't want to spend more
effort if this matter is not really open for discussion.  That's all I
got to say on this topic for now.

Rahul