On 06/27/2011 12:50 PM, Rahul Sundaram wrote: >> Red Hat really likes that splash. I would prefer it remain. > Ironically, when opensource.com was about to be launched, I was > suggesting that splash in the first place but I am not sure putting up > that splash on fedoraproject.org gives the right impression. > Would someone explain what that really means in this context? It boils down to "Red Hat is the parent and primary sponsor of this community". >>> >> 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. > Do note that what I suggest is different. Fedora Project may not able > to hold copyright but Fedora Project contributors certainly can. > Please correct me if I am wrong but both Richard Fontana and Pam seems > to agree with this. There is no reason not to replace all instances of > (C) Red Hat and others within Fedora with (C) Fedora Project > contributors IMO. I see how what you suggested is different, however, "Fedora Project contributors" is not a legal entity, whereas, Red Hat is. The implication in the current statement is that Red Hat is the common copyright holder, among many, which makes for good legal boilerplate. The concern raised is that it implies that Red Hat is the majority copyright holder, which may or may not be true, depending on the work. It is also possible that Red Hat may not hold any copyright on some works, however, I still feel that it is inappropriate to attribute copyright without at least one individual or legal entity as a copyright holder explicitly called out, which is why if we're nitpicking on this level, we should be thorough. For documentation, this should be straightforward, just keep track within the documentation itself, perhaps on the title page or in an appendix. Alternately, because of how the Berne Convention works, there is no requirement to list out Copyright attributions like this, Copyright is not lost if it is not attributed. For documents under CC terms, an appendix of contributors is appropriate to meet the attribution clause (of course, that depends on how the copyright holders want attribution, but that is a different can of worms). >> > 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. > I think you ignored the fact that it clearly is although one could argue > about whether this is worth the price or not. In the entire CLA->FPCA process, I can count on one hand the number of Fedora contributors who felt that the FPCA was confusing or unclear, and I'd still have fingers left. So, I am not ignoring your "fact", but rather, confronting it as an opinion, which I do not agree with, nor do I feel you have any significant evidence to support it. > As I pointed out earlier, > why does anyone submitting content under CC-BY-SA have to agree to the > FPCA? In theory, they would not, but in practice, we have no useful way to enforce that everyone submitting content is doing so under CC-BY-SA, and in fact, we have notable evidence that the default behaviour for most Fedora copyrightable contributions is to come in unlicensed. In my opinion, a one-time agreement to the FPCA at account creation is far superior to building infrastructure around all possible vectors of contribution to Fedora to ensure that a default license is specified. I agree that explicit licensing is a better option, and I do wish to encourage it, but I do not wish to build procedure and red tape around it, when we can be sure that we have what we need for Fedora in a one-time FPCA agreement. ~tom == Fedora Project _______________________________________________ advisory-board mailing list advisory-board@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/advisory-board
