Meeting:Board meeting 2011-07-06

Fedora Board Meeting, 2011-July-06

• Secretary: Jon Stanley
• Meeting type: Phone

Attendence

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