On Fri, Nov 14, 2025 at 03:23:25PM -0600, Michael Winters via legal wrote: > Thanks for the response Kevin. The implicit points about "legitimate > business purposes" are exactly the sort of thing that lay people like myself > need to understand. And yes, everything should be made much more explicit. > > One request if you have time (hah!): Any old emails or other materials you > can dig up and share on the topic would be super helpful.
I don't think I have much. We worked on all this at a face to face meeting (I think it was before a flock/fudcon) where we had a bunch of people in person. There might be some notes, but I don't know that I have them. I can ask around. > > However, there's some semantics here: Is this a seperate project? > > You are working on this in the context of fedora with fedora resources > > (once the POC is done), so a good argument could be made that it's just > > another fedora application run by fedora. > > That's a great question, and I don't know the answer from a legal > standpoint. (Who is "in" Fedora vs. "collaborating with" vs "in > communication with"? If Meta makes a FAS account, are they "in" Fedora?) > > There are probably only two answers: this is either a separate project, or > it isn't. Judging from the concerned comments I've been getting, we need to > provide answers for both scenarios. > > FYI I have generally portrayed Hatlas as "downstream" and separate mainly > because I don't want people to feel a false sense of security with, "it's > ok, it's an official Fedora project". I would feel disingenuous allaying > those concerns when the reality is that anyone else could do whatever they > want with this data today. (At least as far as: there are no technical > measures preventing it, and seemingly none legal either.) I was sort of thinking of it as a 'proof of concept out something' and then propose it be added as a 'fedora' thing, but yeah, best to be careful in early days for sure. > Of course, I'd *really* like to not get sued if the obscure legalities shake > out against me :). So let me say again: my intention here *is* for this to > be a POC for a Fedora project. (With presumably a new non-"hat" name when > it moves.) But I think it's in the casual visitors' best interest to > conceive of it as separate and treat it accordingly. Sure. > > I don't think that work can happen here, we will need to discuss it > > with internal legal folks. > > That's frustrating, but totally understandable. > > Hatlas has generated just as much excitement in our CommOps community as it > has concern outside of it. We're able to make real progress on our goals, > far more quickly than ever before. And we are able to invite into the work > those who have been previously offered to help but been stuck on the > sidelines. yes! Thanks for driving this forward! > I've been holding off on adding more data to Hatlas in the hopes of quick > answers here, but it seems clearer by the day that there are none. > > In lieu of an authoritative legal response, yourself and others in Fedora > leadership have all stated that you believe this data to be freely available > for any purpose, and especially those serving the Fedora community. As > such, I plan to thread that needle of excitement and concern and try to add > to Hatlas the highest-value subsets of data that I can, while still not > providing the full historical dataset. I've shared that plan and thought > process elsewhere, but thought I'd share it here too for visibility. ok. I will try and ask questions as I can and will let you know answers as much and as soon as I can. > Thanks again for your leadership Kevin. I hope you get to sleep someday. I have finally. Things are looking up! kevin -- _______________________________________________ legal mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[email protected] Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
