[Fedora-livecd-list] Re: livecd persistence

[Rahul Sundaram]

Douglas McClendon wrote:

> The issue is, that the current (or as of a couple weeks ago) CLA would 
> appear to give redhat the legal right to take works submitted under the 
> CLA-related channels, and then modify and redistribute them without the 
> GPL style restriction of requiring modifcations to be submitted back to 
> the original author.
> 
> GDK and fedora legal seemed to agree that this was in fact the case, but 
> I have not yet heard back from GDK's reply which he also cc'd to Max.
> 
> If those changes got 'committed' to the CLA to remove that (presumably 
> unintentional, but still unpalatable) loophole, then I would personally 
> sign the CLA, and submit the livecd persistence feature as a proposed 
> feature, such that it could make it into f8t2, as Jeremy clearly has in 
> mind.

IANAL but I don't think it is a loophole. Assigning copyright to any 
entity would give the entity the ability to change the copyright 
licensing terms as suitable. For example, FSF requires a CLA which 
allows it to relicense GNU projects from GPLv2 to GPLv3 which isn't 
otherwise possible under the terms of the license.

This has been useful for Fedora Project earlier when we changed the 
documentation licensing. If there is any requirement to do similar 
things later, we don't have to track every single contributor to do it.

Rahul