Bullet-proof method of asking upstream for clarification?

Paul W. Frields stickster at gmail.com
Thu Jul 24 13:20:40 UTC 2008


On Mon, 2008-07-14 at 20:30 -0400, Jon Stanley wrote:
> :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

Jon,

I posted a draft at:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Pfrields/DraftUpstreamRequestEmail 

It would be nice if some non-English speakers on this list would look at
it.  Then post to the list here to tell me if any of the text rubs you
the wrong way! :-)

-- 
Paul W. Frields
  gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233  5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
  http://paul.frields.org/   -  -   http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/
  irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug
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