[Fedora-marketing-list] Derivate distributions and GPL

Rahul sundaram at fedoraproject.org
Sun Jul 16 10:14:21 UTC 2006


Patrick W. Barnes wrote:
> On Sunday 16 July 2006 04:06, Rahul <sundaram at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
>> "The article revealed that many distributions' maintainers were
>> erroneously assuming that they did not need to provide source
>> repositories for packages they did not modify, so long as the original
>> upstream distribution did provide the source code. This responsibility
>> is by no means new, but seems to have been widely overlooked. David
>> Turner, GPL compliance officer at the Free Software Foundation,
>> suggested that these distros might come into compliance by making some
>> arrangement with the upstream supplier.
>>
>> Turner's suggestion was rejected by Max Spevack, Fedora Board chair,
>> partly because of the possible expense, but chiefly because it might
>> encourage forking and leave the upstream distribution open to legal
>> liability for the downstream one."
>>
>> http://trends.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=06/07/07/2044245&from=rss
>>
>> Not sure how a agreement with upstream would encourage forking. Max, can
>> you expand on that?
>>
>> Needless to say, a better working arrangement with derivative
>> distributions is pretty important for Fedora. We have a number of Fedora
>> derivatives out there that could be doing interesting modifications that
>> we need to look at.
>>
> 
> There's a significant difference between derivative distributions and 
> third-party repositories.  Most of the projects that use Fedora Core as a 
> base are third-party repositories. 

Not really. There are significant number of derivative distribution. In 
fact, its the second largest base according to distrowatch.

http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=independence#fedora

  The derivatives are true forks, and are
> not something we want to get tied to supporting, even though we certainly 
> don't mind enabling them.

This is also incorrect. There a number of distributions which basically 
treat Fedora as upstream and then make modifications on the packages, 
configuration or updates and do it continuously based on newer releases 
of Fedora. Examples here include RHEL and blag

> 
> The Fedora Project's code will remain freely available for the foreseeable 
> future, but there's no reason for us to take responsibility for providing 
> that source to keep a downstream distribution GPL compliant.  If we enter 
> into an agreement with downstream distributions, we could end up being 
> responsible if changes in our code provisions result in those downstream 
> distributions being in violation of the GPL.
> 
> If we do make an open agreement to provide the code for downstream 
> distributions, it becomes almost as easy to handle a downstream distribution 
> as to host a third-party repository.  Since a third-party repository would be 
> more restricted than another distribution, lazy packagers that want to 
> casually modify Fedora Core could end up forking it.  Forcing them to 
> maintain their own code repositories raises the bar to a point where those 
> packagers would have to make a real commitment before forking.
> 

I think we should make it trivially easy to rebrand Fedora and look at 
colloborating with derivative distributions. The form of colloboration 
is not necessarily any sort of legal or business agreements but merely 
working arrangements that help us understand what the derivatives or 
doing and see if we can help out in mutually beneficial ways.

This is more and more important as there is a means to start treating 
Fedora as a big base of packages which people do interesting things from 
rather than just a consumer package.

Rahul




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