[Fedora-legal-list] Request for Comments: Fedora Project Contributor Agreement Draft (Replacement for Fedora Individual Contributor License Agreement)

[inode0]

On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 7:58 AM, Tom "spot" Callaway
<tcallawa at redhat.com> wrote:
> On 04/19/2010 09:11 PM, inode0 wrote:
>> On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 3:21 PM, Tom "spot" Callaway
>> <tcallawa at redhat.com> wrote:
>>> For some time now, Fedora has been working with Red Hat Legal to come up
>>> with a replacement for the Fedora Individual Contributor License
>>> Agreement (aka, the Fedora ICLA). As a result, the Fedora Project
>>> Contributor Agreement (FPCA) has been approved by Red Hat Legal, and is
>>> now being presented to the Fedora Community for comments and discussion.
>>
>> Tom,
>>
>> Since any choice of a single default license for code is likely to be
>> viewed by some as making some sort of a statement could you explain a
>> little bit about the rationale for selecting the MIT License variant
>> that was chosen as the initial default covering code contributions
>> that are submitted without license preference?
>>
>> I presume Red Hat Legal is fine with any free license?! Who selected
>> the MIT License?
>
> I was the one who recommended MIT, because:
>
> 1. It is extremely permissive, possibly the most common "permissive"
> Free license.
> 2. Unlike many of the major common Free licenses (GPL, Apache, MPL), it
> is pretty much universally compatible with other Free licenses.
> 3. It is very very similar to the "license" that we were using for
> unlicensed contributions with the old Fedora ICLA.
>
> That particular MIT variant was chosen on the merits of its legal wording.

Thanks for this explanation. I see points 2 and 3 above as compelling
reasons in support of the selected license. I'm sort of in the
position of being completely satisfied with this if reason 1 above was
fallout from reasons 2 and 3. If reason 1 was the starting point, I'm
still wondering why there would be a default preference for a
non-copyleft license.

> When we looked at content licensing, there was a much smaller set of
> licenses to consider. We wanted to use a license that was permissive and
> as compatible as possible with other content licensing. That narrowed it
> down pretty quickly to the Creative Commons licenses, and given the fact
> that the wiki had already switched to CC-BY-SA, we decided to go with
> it. The waiver of clause 4d was done when Red Hat Legal determined it
> had the potential, if enacted, to make the work non-free.

Isn't CC-BY-SA copyleft, not permissive, and incompatible with the GPL?

One thing I've never been completely clear about is where the line is
drawn in Fedora regarding what is code and what is content so I'm not
sure if there are edge cases where the CC-BY-SA being incompatible
with the GPL (assuming it is) would be an inconvenience.

While not as common, something like the GNU All-Permissive License
seems like it might match your stated goals better in this case and is
really quite similar in spirit to the MIT License selected for code.
It isn't really a general content license but is intended for what is
commonly understood to be documentation included with code.

> And of course, it is important to note that this only applies to code
> contributions made without any licensing already in place. If you would
> prefer that a different license be used for your contribution (and you
> are the copyright holder), then by licensing your contribution
> explicitly, you avoid falling under this conditional. :)

Noted.

> With that said, if people feel strongly that a different license should
> have been used, we're certainly listening, and will take that feedback
> under advisement.

Thanks for the feedback.

John