[Fedora-legal-list] Re: unifont in Fedora

[Tom "spot" Callaway]

On Sat, 2008-07-26 at 14:13 -0400, Qianqian Fang wrote:
> My understanding to Fedora's CLA is that you are not assigning the
> full copyright to Redhat, rather, you ONLY allow them to "to
> reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly
> perform, sublicense, and distribute your Contribution and such
> derivative works; ..."
> 
> In another word, if you define your software license as GPLv2, Redhat 
> can only create derivative work from your software, therefore, they
> can only be GPLv2. Redhat can not own the full copyright and revoke
> your original license of your software.

This is one of the main reasons why we're in the process of trying to
rework the CLA, that section is not clear at all.

1D says "Any Contribution submitted by you to the Project shall be under
the terms and conditions of this License, without any additional terms
or conditions, unless you explicitly state otherwise in the submission."

We're interpreting that like this (in English):

If you contribute something to Fedora which is properly licensed, we
will use it under the terms of that license. In the case where you
contribute something to us without any license whatsoever, we will use
it under the terms of an extremely permissive license.

Specifically, that license is:

"You hereby grant to Red Hat, Inc., on behalf of the Project, and to
recipients of software distributed by the Project:

(a) a perpetual, non-exclusive, worldwide, fully paid-up, royalty free,
irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare derivative works of,
publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute your
Contribution and such derivative works; and,

(b) a perpetual, non-exclusive, worldwide, fully paid-up, royalty free,
irrevocable (subject to Section 3) patent license to make, have made,
use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer your
Contribution and derivative works thereof, where such license applies
only to those patent claims licensable by you that are necessarily
infringed by your Contribution alone or by combination of your
Contribution with the work to which you submitted the Contribution.
Except for the license granted in this section, you reserve all right,
title and interest in and to your Contributions."

(aka, section 2 of the Individual CLA)

Nowhere in the CLA do you assign copyright to Red Hat, Fedora, or anyone
else.

Thanks,

Tom Callaway, Fedora Legal

(Disclaimer: IANAL, this should not be considered legal advice)