Meeting:Board meeting 2011-07-06

= Fedora Board Meeting, 2011-July-06 =


 * Secretary: Jon Stanley
 * Meeting type: Phone

Present

 * Jared Smith
 * Jon Stanley
 * Guillermo Gómez
 * Peter Robinson
 * Rex Dieter
 * Rudi Landmann
 * Tom Callaway (Invited guest)
 * Joerg Simon (late and gobby only)
 * Toshio Kuratomi (late)

Not Present

 * Jaroslav Reznik

Regards

 * David Nalley

Agenda
Updates Board business

Updates

 * Welcome to new members of the Board
 * Welcome to the first phone meetings
 * Meetings every week (can discuss today)
 * Alternating phone/IRC meeting
 * Send agenda items to jsmith or board-private
 * Fedora 16 Schedule
 * Feature freeze on 7/26 (about 3 weeks out)
 * Feature submission deadline 7/12
 * Custom spins submission deadline 7/12
 * key tasks at http://rbergero.fedorapeople.org/schedules/f-16/f-16-key-tasks.html
 * Schedule at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/16/Schedule
 * Update on FUDCon {EMEA/APAC/NA} status
 * Working on coming up with a list of tickets that should be opened for any FUDCon to make it easier to keep track of
 * EMEA in Milan on 9/30-10/2
 * Planning going well
 * APAC - decision is imminently forthcoming,
 * Opening bid for next year as soon as this year's decision is announced (schedule is to do Mar-May next year, in Red Hat fiscal Q1)
 * FUDCon NA Jan 13-15 in Blacksburg, VA.
 * planning meetings start today
 * Possible FAD to evaluate FUDCon planning process (after a FUDCon)?

Board Business

 * FPCA discussion (with Tom Callaway as an invited guest)
 * When Fedora got started, CLA (specifically Apache CLA) was mandated by Red Hat.
 * Interpretation worked for most people, however the text was very confusing
 * Spot started working on a replacement, working with Red Hat Legal to draft
 * Allow explicit licensing, but have a safety net license
 * by agreeing to FPCA, you give permission to use under default license IF UNLICENSED otherwise.
 * FPCA was not mandated by Red Hat Legal (and significant staffing changes since CLA was mandated)
 * Having a default licensing agreement makes sense, don't want to go towards copyright assignment
 * Other projects have similar agreements, for example Asterisk.
 * the hope when the FPCA was crafted was having something legally valid, but still understandable
 * For the most part, positive feedback from FPCA
 * Reached out to people that found the CLA objectionable, universally they had no issues with the FPCA.
 * Requiring explicit licensing is a bearucratic nightmare
 * Would have to build mechanisms to block non-explicitly licensed content.
 * Where do you put/how to check license files in say, JPEG files?
 * We would have to build gates around every possible area of contribution
 * Seems the objection to the FPCA is not that they don't want to sign the FPCA but that it's "hard" to sign the FPCA
 * Would it be better to address those specific usability problems?
 * i18n of FAS/FPCA
 * To be clear, none of the solutions we are evaluating would allow unlicensed contributions to Fedora
 * In the US, at least, there's only minimal rights associated with things that have no license, therefore, we would be on shakey legal grounds if we accepted contributions without license terms
 * Third parties have approached us that were not comfortable contributing to Fedora with either the CLA or no agreement in place, however, they were comfortable with the FPCA.

PROPOSAL: Do we drop FPCA as being mandatory in favor of explicit licensing of all contributions?
 * Board unanimously votes against the proposal.

Other notes

 * Next meeting: Public IRC meeting on Wednesday, July 13th
 * Need to figure out meeting time
 * We'll ask FPC to re-visit their schedule, and if they don't feel like moving, we'll find another time