On Tue, Mar 22, 2022 at 12:25 PM Michal Schorm mschorm@redhat.com wrote:
Hello,
I'm trying to answer this question: "Under which license are the contributions done to Fedora Project, unless license is specified - and how make this clear to the contributors (or whether we make this clear enough)". The answer is _probably_ FPCA [1].
The FPCA basically says that there's a particular default license that applies in cases where the contribution is not "covered by explicit licensing terms that are conspicuous and readily discernible to recipients." This does not spell out what "explicit", "conspicuous" and "readily discernible" actually mean, much as you haven't explained what you mean by "specified". I would assert that the "unlicensed contribution" scenario contemplated by the FPCA is actually going to be fairly rare apart from the special case of spec files, which the FPCA was particularly aimed at. In the typical case, a Fedora-related project makes clear what the applicable license of a repository (or of files within a repository) is/are, and under the "inbound=outbound" convention, that will be understood to be the license of the contribution.
I'm not aware of any reason to make anything clearer that it currently is. I think at this point the FPCA is sort of a historical curiosity that lives on because of inertia (other than as an indirect statement of licensing policy around certain special things like spec files but those could be addressed in a different way).
And this HTTPS workflow leads back to my original question - since FAS users outside of 'packager' group AFAIK don't need to sign FPCA [1], but can contribute a code - under which license or agreement it is contributed ? If it is FPCA - are such contributors aware ?
If contributors haven't signed the FPCA, the FPCA doesn't apply to their contributions. But this is most likely unproblematic, for much the same reason that Fedora could abandon use of the FPCA altogether without causing any significant problem.
Richard
[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal:Fedora_Project_Contributor_Agreement [2] https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/ci/pull-requests/ [3] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure/HTTPS-commits
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Michal Schorm Software Engineer Core Services - Databases Team Red Hat
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