#471 Fedora Council needs to own FE-Legal
Opened a year ago by ngompa. Modified 3 months ago

We are still in a situation where bugs blocked on "Fedora Legal" (note the quotes) are effectively stalled indefinitely.

Two particularly egregious examples are RHBZ#1942132 and RHBZ#2101458, both of which have been stalled for a year now through being blocked by FE-Legal.

It's been a little over a year since @decathorpe filed #408, but it seems like things have not improved. And the issue that led to him filing it isn't resolved either!

At this point, I want FE-Legal to be explicitly owned by Fedora Council, with three basic rules adopted:

  1. SLA for response on FE-Legal requests. It is completely unacceptable that nobody "owns" responding to an FE-Legal request in a reasonable timeframe. From my view, nothing in Fedora has an SLA of longer than 2 weeks, and I think it's more than reasonable to have a similar requirement imposed to engaging on FE-Legal bugs.
  2. If the initial response is negatory, a path to positive resolution should be identified so that the block can be lifted and the package can land, even if it takes a while.
  3. If there is no path to positive resolution to land the package, an explanation that can be sent upstream should be provided so they know how their stuff is problematic.

If you're wondering why I'm attaching such an aggressive set of rules, I'm doing this because I'm sick and tired of the current state of affairs. If you want to water it down on your own, be my guest and incur my unhappiness.

But even if you do that, I no longer will accept "doing nothing". Own this problem and fix it.


I've created a topic on Fedora Discussion for this ticket.

Please keep this ticket focused. Discuss there, and record votes and decisions here. Thanks!

FYI, I'm lifting FE-Legal on RHBZ#1942132 after @catanzaro's comment in the bug. I do not believe there's anything worth blocking on and we've been waiting for far too long (the package review itself started in 2021!)

This is something I will own/drive from a process development and triaging point of view. Formally taking this ticket so I keep myself accountable to it!

Wrt a timeline on process ideas, I would like to target:

2024
August - @ Flock to talk to people and get some ideas and understand painpoints
September - A first draft of a potential process solution
October - Iterations, if necessary
December - End the year with a semi-formal process for handling FE-Legal issues and a basic workflow

Metadata Update from @amoloney:
- Issue assigned to amoloney
- Issue priority set to: None (was: 1)

9 months ago

I don't think FE-Legal should be owned by Council. FE-Legal needs a defined process and an escalation process:

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/legal/

Council should not be reviewing and approving licenses. Fedora Legal Resources documents the current policy, so I think we should just get them to extend the docs to ensure the FE-Legal process is covered.

This is going to be a topic at the councils F2F in February 2025. We will discuss and decide whether this should be owned by council, or triaged by council, or whether we need to find another solution to this issue that is impacting our projects contributors.

Metadata Update from @amoloney:
- Issue tagged with: hackfests, policies

3 months ago

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