Patrick W. Barnes wrote:
On Sunday 16 July 2006 04:06, Rahul <sundaram@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"The article revealed that many distributions' maintainers were
erroneously assuming that they did not need to provide source
repositories for packages they did not modify, so long as the original
upstream distribution did provide the source code. This responsibility
is by no means new, but seems to have been widely overlooked. David
Turner, GPL compliance officer at the Free Software Foundation,
suggested that these distros might come into compliance by making some
arrangement with the upstream supplier.
Turner's suggestion was rejected by Max Spevack, Fedora Board chair,
partly because of the possible expense, but chiefly because it might
encourage forking and leave the upstream distribution open to legal
liability for the downstream one."
http://trends.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=06/07/07/2044245&from=rss
Not sure how a agreement with upstream would encourage forking. Max, can
you expand on that?
Needless to say, a better working arrangement with derivative
distributions is pretty important for Fedora. We have a number of Fedora
derivatives out there that could be doing interesting modifications that
we need to look at.
There's a significant difference between derivative distributions and
third-party repositories. Most of the projects that use Fedora Core as a
base are third-party repositories.
Not really. There are significant number of derivative distribution. In
fact, its the second largest base according to distrowatch.
http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=independence#fedora
The derivatives are true forks, and are
not something we want to get tied to supporting, even though we certainly
don't mind enabling them.
This is also incorrect. There a number of distributions which basically
treat Fedora as upstream and then make modifications on the packages,
configuration or updates and do it continuously based on newer releases
of Fedora. Examples here include RHEL and blag
The Fedora Project's code will remain freely available for the foreseeable
future, but there's no reason for us to take responsibility for providing
that source to keep a downstream distribution GPL compliant. If we enter
into an agreement with downstream distributions, we could end up being
responsible if changes in our code provisions result in those downstream
distributions being in violation of the GPL.
If we do make an open agreement to provide the code for downstream
distributions, it becomes almost as easy to handle a downstream distribution
as to host a third-party repository. Since a third-party repository would be
more restricted than another distribution, lazy packagers that want to
casually modify Fedora Core could end up forking it. Forcing them to
maintain their own code repositories raises the bar to a point where those
packagers would have to make a real commitment before forking.
I think we should make it trivially easy to rebrand Fedora and look at
colloborating with derivative distributions. The form of colloboration
is not necessarily any sort of legal or business agreements but merely
working arrangements that help us understand what the derivatives or
doing and see if we can help out in mutually beneficial ways.
This is more and more important as there is a means to start treating
Fedora as a big base of packages which people do interesting things from
rather than just a consumer package.
Rahul
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