Community Participation, Done Right (Lawyers Too!)

The Fedora Project Contributors' Agreement (sometimes/formerly "CLA", the L is License/ing) must be signed by everyone who registers with the Fedora Account System and receives credentials allowing them to contribute to the project. (That includes software packaging, wiki editing, code checkins, and so on.) It sets the tone both for members' activities within the community, and for that community's relationship with its leaders.

For an open-source, community-driven project's organizational body to be respectful of that community, it mustn't put its own interests ahead of theirs. In fact, it shouldn't even have a concept of "its own interests" distinct from theirs; its only interests are the community's. Any goals that organization has should be narrowly defined, and any rights or authority it asserts should, when faced with conflict or overlap, be deferred. That's the model of a responsible governing body, one that wishes only to consolidate and guide the efforts of its contributors for the benefit of all involved, not appropriate those contributions for its own benefit or profit.

That's why, for Fedora contributors agreeing to & signing the CLA, almost more important than what that does mean is what the agreement doesn't mean. And why, in recognition of that fact, the text of the CLA opens with explicit statements of both points:

The Fedora Project Contributor Agreement

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal:Fedora_Project_Contributor_Agreement

Goal

We require that contributors to Fedora (as defined below) agree to this Fedora Project Contributor Agreement (FPCA) to ensure that contributions to Fedora have acceptable licensing terms.

Non-Goals

The FPCA is *not* a copyright assignment agreement.

The FPCA does *not* somehow supersede the existing licensing terms that apply to Fedora contributions. There are two important subpoints here. First, the FPCA does not apply to upstream code (or other material) that you didn't write; indeed, it would be preposterous for it to attempt to do so. Note the narrow way in which we have defined capital-c "Contribution". Second, the main provision of the FPCA specifies that a default license will apply to code that you wrote, but only to the extent that you have not bothered to put an explicit license on it. Therefore, the FPCA is *not* some sort of special permissive license granted to any party, despite the explicit choice of a more restrictive license by you or by upstream developers.

...Commendable. And why FESCo (the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee), the Fedora Project Board, and anyone else involved should be commended. In this time when free websites have Terms of Use claiming exclusive ownership of everything their users do on the site, this type of dedication to putting the community first — even in their lawyers' fine print — is all too rare.

Posted via email from ferdnyc's posterous