Bullet-proof method of asking upstream for clarification?

[Jon Stanley]

:Perhaps this is in the purview of the docs project, maybe not :)

I was just packaging some fonts [1,2] where the licensing of upstream
was uncertain. In one instance, something licensed upstream as OFL was
actually a derived work from a GPL+Exception font. The author of the
OFL font had permission from the original author to do this, however,
didn't make that clear due to limitations of the distribution website
(http://openfontlibrary.org)

In the other case (same upstream author), there were images from a
museum that he made into a font. It again was unclear whether or not
he had gotten permission to do this (he had).

He viewed my request for clarification, in both instances, as me (and
Fedora) essentially accusing him of being a scumbag thief, which was
quite obviously not the intent - rather the intent was to clear up the
legal status of the fonts to evaluate their suitability for inclusion
in Fedora, a great thing. To add to the misunderstanding, the author
in question is a non-native English speaker.

So the question is whether we can come up with something of a template
for these sorts of things, which can't easily be misconstrued - even
by a non-native speaker, that Fedora as a whole could use to avoid
further misunderstandings of this type? Unfortunately, I don't have
the text of what I sent, since the upstream contact is through a
webform and they reply to the e-mail generated from it.

-Jon

[1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=445261
[2] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=455153