Contributor License Agreement (CLA)?, Re: Wiki page updated

[Rahul Sundaram]

Hi

>>I have also 
>>included the information that Fedora Legacy is now a official Fedora 
>>Project supported by the Fedora Foundation. 
>>    
>>
>
>Good.  I have a question.  No one has said anything about the process of
>signing up with the Fedora Project.  I just discovered that process last
>night on IRC, at the suggestion of <nman64> (Patrick Barnes) that in order
>to officially be a contributor to the Fedora Project, and to gain
>necessary privileges to help me carry out the work for the Fedora project
>(in my case, Bugzilla privileges), I needed to apply at
>	<https://admin.fedora.redhat.com/accounts/>
>get a Fedora Contributor account and (electronically) sign a Contributor
>License Agreement (CLA), among other things.
>
>Is this something that everyone who contributes to Fedora Legacy will be 
>required to do, especially now that Fedora Legacy is officially part of 
>the Fedora Foundation?  If so, does that need to be documented in the 
>Fedora Legacy Wiki?
>  
>
I am not sure about this but this probably is required. Jesse Keating 
can confirm this for you.

>I, for one, feel a bit relieved at being given the opportunity to sign a 
>Contributor License Agreement -- because I have been a little bit 
>concerned for awhile just who might be considered liable if someone used a 
>Legacy package, felt the package damaged their machine or their business 
>and decided to sue.  The CLA (a copy of which is attached) makes it clear 
>that I as a contributor am releasing the work that I do with NO WARRANTEE
>WHATSOEVER, and that this is my understanding -- that I am not offering
>any kind of guarantee that my work will work in all circumstances or won't 
>cause hair to grow on some server's CPU.
>
>(For those who are wondering, docs about signing on to the Fedora Account
>System are at:
>	<http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure/AccountSystem>.)
>  
>
Yes this is one of the intended benefits. See 
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal/ for other details. Red Hat counsel 
based this process on other well established community projects such as 
Apache with a few improvements thrown in line with the Free and open 
source methodology.  If you have any questions on the CLA itself and if 
it is required for the legacy project (which is very likely), let me know.

>  
>
>>I have clarified some 
>>terminology in the pages. As an example of these, Fedora Project in 
>>general has avoiding using the term "support" in any our webpages or 
>>documentation to avoid the confusion with commercial support services 
>>and SLA's. 
>>    
>>
>
>I am assuming then that the Fedora Foundation then officially leaves
>commercial support services and SLA's (Service Level Agreements?) to 
>Red Hat, right?
>  
>
Fedora Foundation does not mention anything about that. It has no say or 
control over who provides support services for Fedora as far as I know. 
The foundation is a overall management and delegation authority. It can 
bless, reject existing or proposed Fedora Projects or choose to shutdown 
stale projects or entities within Fedora as a extreme measure.  It does 
not micro manage any of the sub projects including legacy beyond that 
level. Fedora as a open source project does not discriminate against any 
field of endeavor with OSI definition 
(http://opensource.org/docs/definition.php). Anybody could do commercial 
support including Red Hat if and when deemed necessary. Naturally Red 
Hat believes that those who would want a certified commercial product 
would choose Red Hat Enterprise Linux instead which shares a code base 
with Fedora thereby providing it the ability to continue funding the 
Fedora Project in money and in kind resources (Engineers, services etc) 
and provide Fedora for Free( in both sense of the word) with rapid 
changes released in a rough time based public schedule.
 

>>Information on the security 
>>procedures from the legacy site has also been copied over into the wiki 
>>in anticipation of the depreciation of http://fedoralegacy.org in favor 
>>of adding information to the primary Fedora Project website at 
>>http://fedoraproject.org. Comments and feedback is most welcome.
>>    
>>
>
>Rahul, you removed text mentioning what distributions of RHL and Fedora
>Core that Legacy supports off of the main page at
><http://fedoralegacy.org/wiki/Legacy>.  It seems to me it would be good to
>let that remain there, even if that is a question answered in our FAQ.
>  
>
I did not want us to update two places in the wiki when a new Fedora 
release gets added/removed from legacy.  I have included this 
information as the very first question in the FAQ.  The first FAQ has 
now be imported into a section within the main legacy page automatically 
using a regex macro. This can be slightly fragile. So if you are editing 
the relevant pages make sure you do not break this.  I will keep an eye 
too.

>If I think of other comments, will write more.  Thanks again, Rahul.  And 
>thanks for posting to us that you did so, and for joining our list!
>
You are welcome.

-- 
Rahul 

Fedora Bug Triaging - http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers