puiterwijk
commented
5 years ago Comment by spot: There are significant benefits to having the FPCA be an explicit "agreement" that Fedora contributors actually agree to. To your points:
1) We cannot "just drop" the FPCA. Without an explicit license, a contribution is under no license, until we secure one from the contributor. When they agree to the FPCA, they provide Fedora with an explicit license for all contributions that come in without a license. Given the many ways that a copyrightable contribution could come into Fedora, it is not plausible to have a "wiki" style approach everywhere (where the user is prompted by the site when contributing that it is under a specific license). It is also very clear (hopefully) to others who come across Fedora bits that do not have en explicit license that as a result of the FPCA, they can use it under MIT/CC-BY-SA (e.g. spec files).
2) I see why FPCA agreement would be burdensome for some users who are not contributing to Fedora, so I would not recommend this approach (though legally, I don't see any issue with it).
3) As long as this doesn't introduce cases where people are contributing to Fedora without agreeing to the FPCA, I have no problem with this approach.
Filed for @nirik
In FAS2 we have a bunch of history around cla/fpca handling.
Originally we had cla groups for each group that needed to agree to the contributor license agreement. Joining any of those would then add the user automatically to cla_done, which was used to tell if the user had agreed to the cla. Then we switched to the FPCA, but just band aided that on as cla_fpca instead of cla_fedora.
We have a number of places where we tell people they need to be in 'cla* +1', which is confusing because they often see they are in 'cla_fpca' and 'cla_done' and think that means they are in 2 groups.
For CAIAPI I would like to see if we can do any of the following:
Just drop the fpca agreement required. Assume everyone contributing is doing so under the FPCA, so all accounts just are accounts, no tracking needed.
Just have all new accounts click through and agree to the FPCA (this has downsides for people who just want to use pagure.io or the like)
Make FPCA agreement some checkbox/boolean in accounts so when someone joins a group, it automatically asks them to agree and sets that true and then adds them to the group.
Something else thats not as horrible as what we have now. :)
See also: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/issue/4806
CCing @spot and @mattdm here.