[Fedora-marketing-list] Derivate distributions and GPL

[Max Spevack]

On Sun, 16 Jul 2006, Rahul wrote:

> Not sure how a agreement with upstream would encourage forking. Max, can 
> you expand on that?

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