Re: [Fedora-marketing-list] Derivate distributions and GPL

On Sun, 16 Jul 2006, Rahul wrote: Here's the full text of the email that I sent to Bruce Byfield, the newsforge reporter, from which he quoted briefly: ============== There are several reasons why the Fedora Project would be hesitant to officially sanction downstream distributions to point to upstream code repositiories, rather than those downstream distributions directly redistributing the code. The first has to do with the issue of forking. If the downstream developer has improvements, those improvements should be fed into the upstream code whenever possible. If downstream doesn't want to push those changes upstream, then it makes sense that the downstream distribution should bear the burden of redistributing the source for the forked code. Secondly, there is an issue of legal liability. In the case of an upstream distribution allowing a downstream re-distribution to point at the upstream repositories, the upstream party would be assuming legal liability for the downstream modifier, and that is not something that the Fedora Project is interested in doing. The third issue is that of cost -- which while a valid concern, in my opinion is a lesser issue than the other two. ============== -- Max Spevack + http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MaxSpevack + gpg key -- http://spevack.org/max.asc + fingerprint -- CD52 5E72 369B B00D 9E9A 773E 2FDB CB46 5A17 CF21