On 06/30/2011 02:26 AM, Rahul Sundaram wrote: > I am not sure how that would look like but if informal domain-specific > licensing has more clearly defined boundaries and would not apply to > random things like email, I am in favor of this. However if we had a > informal set of policies and someone picks up a spec file from Fedora > and wants to reuse it outside Fedora, how would they know what rights > they have? My goal in pushing towards explicit licensing is in part to > make it more obvious what to do in such cases. Is there a alternative? Rather than this approach, I think one of the things I believe to be reasonable would be to add items to the FAQ clarifying which items are not considered "Contributions" to Fedora. For example, it was never my intent to state (or imply) that mailing list emails would be assigned a default license under the FPCA, and to be honest, if that concern had been raised during the rather lengthy FPCA review process, I would have added some language to explicitly exclude those sorts of items. Unfortunately, that time has passed, so clarifications via FAQ will have to suffice. The Fedora Privacy Policy says: Fedora often makes chat rooms, forums, mailing lists, message boards, and/or news groups available to its users. Please remember that any information that is disclosed in these areas becomes public information. I do not consider any normal postings to those areas to be covered by the FPCA, which is also why we do not require FPCA agreement in order to subscribe to Fedora mailing lists, message boards, chat rooms, forums, and/or news groups. Attachments in these areas (e.g. patches, art) would fall under the FPCA once they were in some way used (here I am using the very broad English definition of use that includes modification, distribution, etc, as opposed to the limited legal definition) by a Fedora Contributor, who is taking "responsibility to first obtain authorization from the copyright holder to Submit the Contribution under the terms of this FPCA on behalf of, or otherwise with the permission of, that copyright holder." (I suppose this would also be true if there was a scenario in which a posting to one of those areas was Copyrightable and a Fedora Contributor wanted to "use" it.) Notably, this logic is really no different from the reasonable best practice behaviour of dealing with files found on the internet: If the license is not clear, you cannot assume any permissions, you should seek clarifications from the copyright holder(s). The FPCA does not magically supercede this, but rather, it explicitly codifies it. ***** Another notable case is Bugzilla. Since we share a bugzilla infrastructure with Red Hat, it is not practical at this time to require FPCA agreement for Fedora Bugzilla accounts. Thus, bugzilla postings or attachments are not considered "Contributions" to Fedora. (Please note that I reserve the right to revisit this if/when Fedora moves on to its own bugzilla instance.) However, I would argue that most copyrightable attachments submitted via Bugzilla are intended to be applied to Fedora packages. Once a Fedora packager takes an attachment from Bugzilla and uses it in Fedora, it becomes a Fedora Contribution and falls under the FPCA agreement that the Fedora Packager agreed to. Again, this means that we expect that the Fedora Packager is taking "responsibility to first obtain authorization from the copyright holder to Submit the Contribution under the terms of this FPCA on behalf of, or otherwise with the permission of, that copyright holder." ***** What I think is a reasonable response here would be to add a FAQ entry containing the "blacklist" of things which are not considered contributions. The items I have suggested above are the only items that I can think of which would qualify for such a blacklist (well, maybe also anything else that we consider "Personal Information" in the privacy policy, if we're being anal, but I doubt that would qualify as Copyrightable.) Nevertheless, I am open to suggestions here. ***** Lastly, to your specific point about third-parties being unaware of the default implicit licensing on Fedora Contributions, specifically, spec files, well, I would argue that those third-parties should be acting according to the best-practice principle of files with unknown licensing found on the internet. We can add text to the FPCA page that will make it more likely that someone doing a web search to find the answer to that question finds it on that page, or those third parties can simply ask either legal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx or the applicable Fedora Package Maintainer for clarification on the license of the Contribution (in this case the spec files). I'm not at all opposed to Fedora Contributors choosing to place explicit licenses on their Contributions, and I have notably advocated this whenever it is possible and reasonable to do so, but I do not believe that mandating such behaviour is beneficial or practical, given the wide scope of the Fedora Project and its Contributors. ~tom == Fedora Project _______________________________________________ advisory-board mailing list advisory-board@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/advisory-board
