On Wed, Jun 29, 2011 at 01:38:13AM +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote: > On 06/28/2011 10:46 PM, Toshio Kuratomi wrote: > > So, I consider it your responsibility to at least come up with the precise > > question that you want to ask Red Hat Legal > > Did Red Hat Legal drive the requirement for the FPCA? I'll try to answer this. As Tom Callaway has noted in the FAQ at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal:Fedora_Project_Contributor_Agreement Many people were involved in helping to craft this text. The primary author was Richard Fontana, with feedback from Tom Callaway, Pamela Chestek, Paul Frields, and Robert Tiller. Pam and I are lawyers at Red Hat (on a team we call the IP Group) and we report to Rob, who is Vice President and Assistant General Counsel for Intellectual Property at Red Hat. I mention Pam and Rob here not only because they had some part in providing feedback on the text which, as Tom says, I mainly wrote, but also to point out the very important fact that none of us were part of pre-2008 Red Hat. Rob joined Red Hat shortly before I did (I joined in February 2008). Pam joined Red Hat about a year later IIRC. The Fedora CLA was, as far as I understand, drafted some years earlier (as a modification of the Apache ICLA) by Mark Webbink, who retired from Red Hat around mid-2008. Incidentally, in case anyone missed it, Mark, who recently took on PJ's role at Groklaw, discussed the FPCA briefly here: http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20110524120303815 . So, when I joined Red Hat, the Fedora CLA was already an established feature of the project. I am entirely unfamiliar with the original rationale for the Fedora CLA. It seemed to me that Fedora had built an elaborate administrative apparatus around the existence of the CLA (though I now see that was a misunderstanding on my part). So, it existed, and the question presented to us was never whether it should exist, but rather whether it should be changed, whether it was causing problems in its existing form (and whether possible changes might make such problems worse), and also whether it was generalizable to projects outside of Fedora with which Red Hat development teams had a sufficiently intimate relationship. All this is a matter of public record. Not one person I encountered ever really questioned the legitimacy of some sort of contributor agreement for Fedora (a question which, as I have previously said to Rahul, anyone should feel free to ask and discuss). The issue seemed to be the specifics. I think the beginnings of some discussion of how to revise the Fedora CLA (which ultimately led to the FPCA) began in the summer of 2008 - mainly between me and Tom Callaway. Although Tom does not credit himself in that FAQ, he is actually the main architect of the FPCA. I did most of the drafting, and I made substantive and nonsubstantive suggestions, but the design - particularly the revolutionary feature of an opt-out-able default license - was his. And it was basically a codification of his own interpretive effort to save the old Fedora CLA from failure. Did Red Hat Legal tell Tom Callaway that the Fedora CLA had to be revised, and according to such a design? Absolutely not. Tom, supported by Paul Frields who was then FPL, suggested this at his own initiative. So, "Did Red Hat Legal drive the requirement for the FPCA?" The answer is no. My assumption has always been that the FPCA had the full backing of the Fedora Board, and/or that it had delegated to Tom Callaway (given his responsibility for legal matters relating to Fedora) the authority to get it drafted. Would the FPCA have existed if the Fedora CLA had not previously existed? I don't know. The historical baggage of the old Fedora CLA will always make it something of a special case. But what matters is whether the Fedora project leadership have considered and approved the FPCA, and whether use of the FPCA itself is rationally justified. I consider the answer to the latter question to be 'yes' (perhaps I have some bias as main drafter), and I assume that the answer to the former question is at least informally 'yes'. - RF -- Richard E. Fontana Open Source Licensing and Patent Counsel Red Hat, Inc. _______________________________________________ advisory-board mailing list advisory-board@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/advisory-board
