[CentOS-devel] CentOS CLA (Contributor License Agreement)

On Mon, Jun 29, 2015 at 10:53:31AM -0500, Jim Perrin wrote:
> > I'm curious which areas you find too restrictive. The list of
> > acceptable open source / free software licenses? Or, you need to be
> > able to accept unlicensed contributions? (Note that the list includes a
> > number of very unrestrictive licenses, including CC0 and WTFPL (or NLPL
> > if you prefer.)
> A bit of both. We may need some unlicensed contributions so something
> like "if you submit code you wrote without a license, the default distro
> license of GPLv2 applies"  or something.

Right, that "something" is almost all of what the FPCA does — except
MIT instead of GPL.

I am kind of getting the sense that people who are opposed to the FPCA
haven't actually looked at it. :-/

> The other bit that may come up is the need to distribute non-free (but
> legal) code. For example a hardware vendor supplies a binary blob for an
> aarch64 network card, or a SIG decides to include the nvidia binary etc.
> So long as they can be legally distributed without cost, it should be
> possible.

Under section 1 of the FPCA, as long as there is some authorization
from the copyright holder, this would be okay. (Our list of approved
open source / free software licenses is explicitly given as one form of
authorization, but not necessarily the only one.)


-- 
Matthew Miller
<mattdm at fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader