Archive:FedoraLegalIssues

Fedora Legal Questions

aka the "We Are Not Lawyers" page

This page describes all currently open legal questions associated with the Fedora Project. These are questions asked by the Fedora community. Posting a question here does not imply that we will provide legal advice for that question -- it's a place to track our own concerns.

For priority: 1 is "do it now", 2 is "do it soon", 3 is "do it at some point".

Issue	Requestor	Notes
Priority 1
Extras repackaging	FESCO	Initial reaction from counsel: it should be acceptable to allow people to repackage any strict subset of Extras, call it "Fedora Extras," and be covered, so long as content from OUTSIDE of Fedora Extras is NOT used. Counsel has asked for assistance in drawing up revisions to the usage guidelines to codify this opinion.
CLA clarification	ElliotLee	Need clarification on precisely what activities require a CLA. Is checking into CVS the gate, as I assume?
Use of xmlformat/REX	FDSCo	See http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-docs-list/2005-June/msg00077.html - Need a confirmation that this analysis is correct. This is a "1" because the FDP is starting to bust at the seams WRT DocBook/XML, given a multiplicity of tools being used. N.B.: Despite the message contents, we are NOT looking to put this in Extras; xmlformat provides a standalone Perl script, which will be in our build process/CVS repo.
Translation of legal notice.	FDSCo	To translate the FDP legal notice, we need it approved by a lawyer in each language; should RH translators do the initial work? Is this even possible, considering the different laws of different countries? Might be simpler now, let's look at this after we settle down our licensing discussions.
Priority 2
CLA in german	FabianAffolter	Handling of the German Version of CLA in the Fedora Project. It's a translation to help new constributer to understand and not a replacement of the original version of the CLA.
Legality of CLA in Germany	MichaelSchwendt	Michael brings up the possibility that the CLA is invalid in Germany because the assigmment of copyright is not legal under German law
Export restrictions for Iraq	GregDeKoenigsberg	We still have Iraq listed on Fedora site (and perhaps other places) as an embargoed destination. Is this still true, since Iraq is all liberated and happy and stuff? (See, e.g., [1] .)
Typo in CLA	SethVidal	point 5 on page 3 mentioned 'atents' instead of what it should read which is 'patents'.
Priority 3
libmimic statsus	NadeDamien	http://www.jblinux.net/libmimic/ An LGPL video encoding/decoding library for Mimic V2.x- encoded conten, which is the encoding used by MSN Messenger for webcam conversations.

Fedora Legal Closed Issues

Legal issues that we've closed are listed below.

Issue	Requestor	Resolved Date	Notes
Firefox naming in Fedora	Enrico Scholz	9 Sept 2006	Fedora Project via Red Hat has explicit permission to retain the brand names from Mozilla Corporation to use pango related modifications that has been made in Firefox and Thunderbird
Copyright and license on materials on fedoraproject.org, specifically in the Wiki	FDSCo	9 Sept 2006	Everybody who contributes to the wiki MUST sign CLA and the current wiki license along with the rest of formal Fedora documentation is under OPL license without the options
Inclusion of Mono	FESCO	10th Jan 2006	Mono is in rawhide now. http://gregdek.livejournal.com/4008.html and http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/?p=159
szip Licensing	Tom Callaway	22sep2005	Szip's license was determined to be incompatible with Fedora Extras.
Blessing external forums	FESCO	11mar2005	According to counsel, there's no risk in referring our users to any other "blessed" forum however we see fit. We are sending users there for help, nothing more, and are not likely to be held responsible for content there.
Monkey audio licensing issues	MichaelSchwendt	11mar2005	Monkey audio package has been pulled, so this is a non-issue.
NTFS legality	WarrenTogami	11mar2005	Microsoft has a number of patents around NTFS. Because of these issues, counsel feels that adding ntfs support runs the risk of significantly endangering the project. Therefore, NTFS will continue to be excluded from Fedora. Bug 65749 has been amended to reflect this decision. GianlucaSforna: this was recently reconsidered
Naming contest	FESCO	11mar2005	Naming contest is approved; since there's no fungible value to the "prize," and since we control the names in question, there's no legal risk entailed.
Linking to fedorafaq.org et al	FDSCo	July 2005	Where and under what conditions can we link to fedorafaq.org and related sites that may have links to potentially illegal stuff? -- resolution, we can link directly to this site but not explain what you may find there, other than general help for Fedora users.

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