On Wed, Aug 25, 2021 at 7:11 PM Matthew Miller <mattdm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > On Tue, Aug 24, 2021 at 10:02:39PM -0400, Richard Fontana wrote: > > Indeed, this should have been caught when the FPCA was updated to > > reference CC BY-SA 4.0 as the default content license. The relevant > > perceived problematic feature of CC BY-SA 3.0 Unported was fixed in CC > > BY-SA 4.0. > > That sounds like a clerical update rather than actually any policy change, > so presumably we can just make the edit without sending out new > announcements, etc? > > > I don't know if it is better to fix this error or to instead look into > > eliminating the FPCA requirement. The FPCA is now basically outdated > > and has the detriment of being pointed to by certain CLA advocates as > > proof that "Red Hat supports CLAs". > > I think we should make the change. I agree about this detriment -- GitLab, > for example, erroneously called us out in their press release about adout > this, and when Neal attempted to correct them, first argued > > "While FPCA may not be a typical CLA with regard to rights and > restrictions, this is not the only factor we looked into. We also were > looking into whether there were terms in general, other than commonly used > open source terms. Our analysis took into account that non-legal users do > not always understand the nuances of legal language and can be deterred by > any CLA, restrictive or not, if they do not understand the terms." > > ... before they eventually changed it. I know that some folks in the CentOS > project had this notion about Fedora requiring a CLA as well. At some point, > the downsides of perception outweigh any real benefits. > > BUT THAT SAID: we have a lot of stuff in the project wired to the assumption > that the FPCA was agreed to. (And as another awful aside, we still call that > flag "CLA" pretty much everywhere.) Like, for example, voting. So all of > that would need to be addressed, making this at least A Project. > For what it's worth, Red Hat *did* have a project that used a traditional CLA for a long time: eCos. Today, it uses a CAA to assign copyright to the FSF: https://ecos.sourceware.org/contrib.html Cygwin also had a messy contribution process for a while as a result of the acquisition of Cygnus (yeah, I'm going that far back!). The website still references it, but I think it's out of date: https://cygwin.com/contrib.html I wish we had promoted the FPCA as a general alternative framework to traditional CLAs promoted by proprietary-in-OSS/open-core companies. It's not like these agreements are valueless. Indeed, the FPCA shares more in common with the DCO than what most people consider CLAs and both are effectively contributor agreements. And again, getting rid of it means we have to make some very significant process changes for accepting contributions. I'm not sure we really want to do that. For example, we're going to need some kind of agreement when accepting new packages into the project. We're also going to need to figure out how to make licensing a part of package specs and other content we typically don't directly note because we currently rely on the FPCA for that. It's going to be *really* messy to switch to an agreement-less system. -- 真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth! _______________________________________________ legal mailing list -- legal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to legal-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/legal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Do not reply to spam on the list, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure
