[Fedora-legal-list] Re: unifont in Fedora

Qianqian Fang fangqq at gmail.com
Sat Jul 26 18:13:33 UTC 2008


hi Paul

My understanding to Fedora's CLA is that you are not assigning the full 
copyright
to Redhat, rather, you ONLY allow them to "to reproduce, prepare derivative
works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute 
your
Contribution and such derivative works; ..."

In another word, if you define your software license as GPLv2, Redhat 
can only
create derivative work from your software, therefore, they can only be
GPLv2. Redhat can not own the full copyright and revoke your original
license of your software.

The only word I am not clear is "sublicense", although it does not sound
like "re-license" or "dual-license".

I CCed Fedora legal mailing list, and hope someone can provide a more
definite answer to your concerns.

Qianqian

Paul Hardy wrote:
> Qianqian,
>
> I signed up for a Fedora account to submit my work.  I then found that
> I had to sign a CLA (Contributor License Agreement) before my work
> could be submitted to the Fedora project.  The CLA requires you to
> assign a non-exclusive copyright to Red Hat.  If Red Hat has a
> copyright to my work, they can circumvent the GPL.  For example, they
> can make proprietary changes to anything I send them, then have
> exclusive rights to change their modified work for profit, denying me
> and anyone else access to their proprietary changes.
>
> I therefore do not want to sign the CLA, so I am not going to put
> unifont into Fedora myself.
>
> However, please feel free to enter unifont into Fedora if you want.
> That way you're entering my work without my signing away a copyright
> (thereby giving Red Hat the power to circumvent the GPL).
>
> If you don't want to put unifont into Fedora yourself, I'll let other
> people in Fedora who emailed me about this know so one of them can if
> they want.  I had already told a few (with you CCed on the email) that
> I would be bringing the font into Fedora.
>
> Let me know what you want to do one way or another: either put unifont
> into Fedora yourself, or let me know you aren't going to do it so I
> can email the other people who asked about getting the font into
> Fedora.
>
> Thanks!
>
>
> Paul
>
>
>
>   




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