Be excellent - answer questions

[Matt Domsch]

On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 11:08:00AM +0200, Christoph Wickert wrote:
> I think an important part of being excellent is to reply to questions,
> so I'd like to re-send my questions about fedoracommunity.org. I already
> sent them 10 days ago, but so far nobody has replied.

Well, some of the answers came as part of the "yet another website"
thread.
 
> I'd like to know more about the idea behind and the history of
> fedoracommunity.org. Who's idea was this? When was it discussed in
> public? If it was not discussed, was it at least announced? I just
> searched 65.000 Fedora related mails and could not find anything
> related (except this discussion of course).

As I understand it, this was the brainchild of Paul, Mike McGrath, and
Red Hat's Legal dept. as a way to address the growing numbers of
domain names being purchased that have 'fedora' in their names.  Per
the trademark guidelines, each of those domains must agree to the
'use in a domain name trademark license'.  Instead, individuals
wishing to run their own web site with 'Fedora' in the domain name
could instead request a subdomain of fedoracommunity.org, which does
not require signing that license.  The trademark guidelines still
apply of course.  Individuals wouldn't be _required_ to get a
subdomain in *.fc.org, they can still purchase domains with 'fedora' in
their names, but then would need to sign the trademark license.
*.fc.org was seen as a way to lower that burden.


The first public disclosure of the purchase of fedoracommunity.org was
within days of its purchase.  I see it was registered on 2 Feb, the
Infrastructure team was made aware of it on 4 Feb:
  https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-infrastructure-list/2009-February/msg00053.html
and it was noted in a message to f-a-b on 8 Feb in regards to the "EOL
Security" domain request.
  https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-advisory-board/2009-February/msg00039.html

I don't think it was _announced on a mailing list_ per say, but was
included in the "Local community domains" wiki page (which the Board
was working to revise to add flexibility) at that time.
   https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Local_community_domains

 
> Is getting a *.fedoracommunity.org subdomain limited to the group of
> Fedora contributors or FAS account holders?

As the Board approves each request, I don't see the Board approving
such for non-Fedora contributors or people not FAS account holders.
That seems like quite a low bar.

 
> How about content control? In the previous discussions about community
> websites (on fedora-ambassadors-list back in January) the question
> emerged if we were allowed to link to rpmfusion or even livna. Can
> someone publish a "How to watch copy-protected DVDs with Fedora" article
> or similar on fedoracommunity.org or any other community website?

I'm going to defer to the legal folks here.

 
> Are we allowed to speak freely on these sites? According to the
> trademark guidelines Red Hat gives licenses "solely in connection with
> the promotion of the Fedora Project." When someone criticizes a decision
> or recent development in Fedora, this surely is not promotion any
> longer. Can Red Hat revoke the license because of that?

If the site's only purpose is to criticize (as opposed to engage in
reasonable discussion), then I doubt that would be in the Project's
best interest to let such be set up on *.fedoracommunity.org.  But if
people engage in healthy (and polite) debate about aspects of the
Project as part of wider discussions, I consider that to be a good
thing.

Thanks,
Matt