On Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 02:18:11AM +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote: > On 06/29/2011 09:39 PM, Richard Fontana wrote: > > Just my opinion: This is probably not practical. Non-explicit > > licensing is a deeply embedded practice in free software development > > culture and may even be essential to its efficient operation in many > > cases. > > Other distributions seems to get along just fine without a FPCA type > agreement. Canonical has a disastrously bad CLA Copyright assignment agreement, to be more precise, though many things called CLAs are quite similar. > but openSUSE, > Mandriva, Mageia etc seem to have no contributor agreements afaik. I > am leaving out non corporate affliated distros as I assume they aren't > in the same position. I wouldn't assume the practices of those other distros are not relevant or helpful to know about (regardless of whatever affiliation may or may not exist). I think they are highly relevant. But anyway, I am concerned that three different issues are being mixed up here: 1) Should a distro project have some sort of contributor agreement? 2) Should a distro project specifically have an agreement like the FPCA? 3) Should a distro project mandate an explicit licensing policy? As to 1) the answer is clearly 'not necessarily'. Most free software projects do not use contributor agreements, and no one has yet convinced me that there is something special about distro projects that make them more (rather than less) appropriate in that setting. As to 2), I am not surprised that Fedora is the only distro project that uses an agreement like the FPCA, because (as far as I know) nothing like the FPCA has ever been used before (except in the sense that in its latter days the Fedora CLA was interpreted in a way that was somewhat like the FPCA). As to 3), that was what I was addressing in my previous message. The choice is not necessarily between having some sort of contributor agreement and having an explicit licensing policy. I believe a mandatory explicit licensing policy is generally impractical, although I think there may be some projects that have attempted to implement such policies to some degree. (The likely correctness of this intuition with respect to Fedora has been confirmed to me to my satisfaction in recent conversations I've had with Tom Callaway.) > Let's get specific then. I suggest explicit licensing for all Fedora > content including website and documentation. All spec files and > kickstart files. I am sure one could find corner cases here and I could > equally well point out things that FPCA doesn't cover but I would like > to know if this leaves out anything major that the FPCA does cover I don't think this would generally work. What I think might work is a set of informal domain-specific default licensing policies as an alternative to, or supplement to, the FPCA. I think you could argue that that's in effect what is in place already for Fedora documentation, and you could also argue that it is implemented in part using explicit licensing. - RF _______________________________________________ advisory-board mailing list advisory-board@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/advisory-board
