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Community contributions and copyright assignment
Over the course of the last month or so, your editor has been to six
conferences on three continents. When engaged in that kind of travel, it
is, of course, obligatory to determine which country has the best beer;
normally, substantial amounts of research are required. It's also normal
to hear what's on one's co-researchers' minds while carrying out this
task. This time around, your editor heard grumbles from a surprising
number of people, all about the same topic: copyright assignment policies.
In particular, developers are concerned and unhappy about the copyright assignment policy that Canonical has chosen for all of its projects. This agreement [PDF] is a relatively simple read; it fits on a single page. It applies to a long list of projects, including Bazaar, Launchpad, Quickly, Upstart, and Notify-osd; contributions to any of those projects must be made under the terms of this agreement. So what do contributors agree to? The core term is this:
I hereby assign to Canonical with full title guarantee all
copyright now or in the future subsisting in any part of the world
in any Assigned Contributions.
So Canonical gets outright ownership of the code. In return, Canonical gives the original author rights to do almost anything with that code. Assigning copyright to Canonical could well be an obstacle for potential contributors, but there are a couple of other terms which make things worse. One of them is this:
Canonical will ordinarily make the Assigned Contributions available
to the public under a "Free Software Licence", according to the
definition of that term published by the Free Software Foundation
from time to time. Canonical may also, in its discretion, make the
Assigned Contributions available to the public under other license
terms.
There are many free software developers who might balk at giving their code away to somebody who "ordinarily" will make it available under a free license. And the final sentence is even worse; "other license terms" is, of course, euphemistic language for "proprietary terms." Finally, there is the patent pledge:
I will not assert or enforce any patent against (a) Canonical (b)
anyone who received the Software and/or the Assigned Contributions
from Canonical or (c) anyone who received the Software and/or the
Assigned Contributions under a Free Software Licence, where that
patent is infringed by any of them exercising copyright rights in
the Software and/or the Assigned Contributions
This language is likely to be just fine for many developers who have no intention of asserting patents against anybody anyway. But it's worth noting that (1) the patent grant is broad, including anything which might be added to the program (by others) in the future, and (2) there is no "self defense" exception allowing patents to be used to fight off litigation initiated by others. So, to a patent holder, this language is going to look like a unilateral disarmament pledge with unknown (and unknowable) scope. For many companies - even those which are opposed to software patents in general - that requirement may well be enough, on its own, to break the deal. Contributor agreements abound, of course, though their terms vary widely. One might compare Canonical's agreement with the Free Software Foundation's language, which reads:
The Foundation promises that all distribution of the Work, or of
any work "based on the Work", that takes place under the control of
the Foundation or its assignees, shall be on terms that explicitly
and perpetually permit anyone possessing a copy of the work to
which the terms apply, and possessing accurate notice of these
terms, to redistribute copies of the work to anyone on the same
terms. These terms shall not restrict which members of the public
copies may be distributed to. These terms shall not require a
member of the public to pay any royalty to the Foundation or to
anyone else for any permitted use of the work they apply to, or to
communicate with the Foundation or its agents in any way either
when redistribution is performed or on any other occasion.
Not all developers are big fans of the FSF, but most of them trust it to live up to those particular terms. The FSF agreement makes no mention of patents at all (though GPLv3 is certainly not silent on the subject). What about other projects? The Apache Software Foundation has an agreement by which the ASF is granted a license (which it promises not to use "in a way that is contrary to the public benefit or inconsistent with its nonprofit status") but the author retains ownership of all code. Sun's contributor agreement [PDF], which now covers MySQL too, gives Sun the right to do anything with the code, but shares joint ownership with the author. An extreme example is the SugarCRM agreement, which appears to transfer not just the author's copyrights, but his or her patents (the actual patents, not a license) as well. Agreements like Sun's and SugarCRM's are common when dealing with corporate-owned projects; they clearly prioritize control and the ability to take things proprietary over the creation of an independent development community. More community-oriented projects, instead, tend to take a different approach to contributor agreements. Canonical is being criticized in a way that SugarCRM is not, despite the fact that Canonical's agreement appears to be the friendlier of the two. A plausible reason for that difference is that Canonical presents itself as a community-oriented organization, but it is pushing a more corporate-style contributor agreement. Canonical's policy is especially likely to worry other Linux distributors. They are often happy to contribute to a project controlled by a different distributor, but they do not normally do so under terms which allow the recipient to take the code proprietary. Licenses like the GPL ensure fair dealing between companies; contributor agreements which allow "other license terms" remove any assurance of fair dealing. It is not surprising that some people are uninterested in contributing code under such terms. The real sticking point, at the moment, appears to be Upstart. Other distributors either have adopted it or are considering doing so; it does appear to be a substantial improvement over the old SYSV init scheme. In the course of adopting Upstart, these distributors are certain to fix problems and make improvements to suit their needs. But they are rather less certain to contribute those changes back under Canonical's terms. In his wanderings, your editor has heard developers talk about possibly forking Upstart. Another developer claimed to be working on a completely new alternative system for system initialization which would take lessons from Upstart, but which would be an independent development. Neither of these outcomes seems optimal. Your editor sent in a query asking what prevents Canonical from adopting more contributor-friendly terms, but got no answer over the course of a couple of days. Groups requiring copyright assignment often claim that it's necessary for them to be able to take action against copyright infringers. But the projects which have had the most success in that area - the Linux kernel and Busybox, for example - have no copyright assignment policy. The other thing that copyright assignment allows, of course, is a relicensing of the code. The FSF has made use of this privilege to move its projects to GPLv3; companies like MySQL have, instead, used it to ship code under proprietary terms. One might assume that Canonical has no such intent, but the fact that Canonical has explicitly reserved the right to do so is unlikely to make people comfortable. When developers contribute code to a project, they tend to get intangible rewards in return. So asking them to hand over ownership of the code as well might seem to be pushing things a little too far. Even so, many developers are willing to contribute under such terms. But there are limits, and allowing a competitor to take code proprietary may well be beyond those limits - as are overly-broad patent grants for contributors who are concerned about such things. Companies which demand such rights may find that their community projects are not as successful as they would like. (Log in to post comments)
Run this by your fiancee's lawyer? Posted Oct 28, 2009 17:50 UTC (Wed) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link] When you transfer a copyright "with full title guarantee" are you in effect offering a warranty of non-infringement? And what does that open you up to in the event of accidental or unconscious copying? (Least attractive proposal ever: "I'm a party to a one-sided agreement with a foreign corporation...will you marry me?")
Community contributions and copyright assignment Posted Oct 28, 2009 18:00 UTC (Wed) by jimbo (subscriber, #6689) [Link]
Perhaps Canonical may be persuaded to adopt the FSF's language concerning copyright assignment?
I'd like to see Canonical publish a more thorough explanation of the patent policy, too.
A slightly disappointed Ubuntu fan.
Community contributions and copyright assignment Posted Oct 28, 2009 18:02 UTC (Wed) by juliank (subscriber, #45896) [Link]
Canonical seems to provide Bazaar under different licenses as well, if
needed, which may include proprietary ones, see http://bazaar- vcs.org/BzrFeatures.
Upstart can only be licensed under GPL-compatible terms, since it links
Community contributions and copyright assignment Posted Oct 28, 2009 18:05 UTC (Wed) by gregkh (subscriber, #8) [Link]
libudev is LGPL, so that does not mean that the linking program has to be released under the GPL.
Community contributions and copyright assignment Posted Oct 28, 2009 18:27 UTC (Wed) by juliank (subscriber, #45896) [Link]
Yes, I see. The Ubuntu package simply stated in debian/copyright that the
whole of udev is licensed under the GPL; so this is a packaging bug. Thanks for correcting me.
Community contributions and copyright assignment Posted Oct 28, 2009 20:51 UTC (Wed) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]
Evidently the Ubuntu version of udev is straight GPL, until they change it.
Community contributions and copyright assignment Posted Oct 28, 2009 18:12 UTC (Wed) by mcopple (guest, #2920) [Link]
I think Canonical is one of those companies that usually tries to do the "right thing," but sometimes gives the lawyers too much wiggle room. They also seem to be having a tough time figuring out whether they are an open source company that has some proprietary products, or a proprietary company that happens to sponsor a distribution.
Community contributions and copyright assignment Posted Oct 28, 2009 21:23 UTC (Wed) by jospoortvliet (subscriber, #33164) [Link]
I kind-a share your sentiment. Let's hope it's true and they solve this
issue shortly... A bit publicity, like this article, will certainly help :D
That's why I really appreciate Corbet's articles on this and similar
Community contributions and copyright assignment Posted Oct 28, 2009 18:27 UTC (Wed) by danpb (subscriber, #4831) [Link]
When an organization wants community contributors to signed a copyright assignment, the question is not simply whether they are expected to do the right thing wrt the community. It is about what might happen to them in the future, in particular public companies are susceptible to corporate takeovers, and privately held companies may sell out to someone else.
Although both MySQL and VirtualBox were already selling code under closed-source licenses before acquisition, the rapid change in ownership to Sun, and then Oracle, nicely highlights how your work can end up in the hands of unexpected players whom you might well not have given copyright assignment to had they been the original owners. So pretty much the only people I'd be happy giving copyright assignment to would be independent, non-profit foundations which are safe from corporate takeovers.
[OT] SugarCRM Posted Oct 28, 2009 20:02 UTC (Wed) by AlexHudson (guest, #41828) [Link]
Wow, their patent contribution stuff should have people running for the hills:
"You assign all right[s ..] in all patents, inventions copyrights and related moral rights ("IP Rights") [..] to SugarCRM[. ..] SugarCRM grants to you a non-exclusive [..] license to [..] Your Contributions[..]"
So, if you hold a patent which touches some SugarCRM contribution you make, you lose the patent and any rights to use it outside those SugarCRM contributions.
I'm not going to defend software patents for one second, but that's a pretty spectacular agreement if they think people will sign up for that.
But then you can probably count community contributions to SugarCRM on the fingers of one hand (I've tried).
Covenant back Posted Oct 28, 2009 21:26 UTC (Wed) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link] FSF has a clear covenant back to the contributor. That's what is lacking from the other agreements.The covenant that I am using for a project I'm working on promises to continue to release our development under an Open Source license for a period of two years, or to remove the contribution from the work. It doesn't mention commercial licenses, we have the right to issue them or not. It applies to our assigns (any company we sell the asset to). You have to give people a reason to make the assignment, something more than "we'll put it in our maintained source tree which we might make entirely proprietary tomorrow."
Community contributions and copyright assignment Posted Oct 29, 2009 0:16 UTC (Thu) by ewan (subscriber, #5533) [Link]
It seems to me that the optimal outcome for upstart would be an x.org style fork, with the other distributions agreeing on a common base and leaving Ubuntu behind. That would be even simpler than the x.org case so long as Canonical release their changes under the GPL since it would still be possible to include them in the fork as well as changes from other sources.
Community contributions and copyright assignment Posted Oct 29, 2009 2:57 UTC (Thu) by mchehab (subscriber, #41156) [Link]
> It seems to me that the optimal outcome for upstart would be an x.org
> style fork
I suspect that the terms of the "contributors agreement" will work, in practice, as a non-GPL license, provided that all contributors to upstart sign it.
For example, imagining that a forked version is created, while the original upstart keeps under GPL, it will be possible for the forked versions to get patches from the official upstart version.
However, as Canonical developers are bound to the agreement, they cannot get the patches from the forked version back to their version without violating the agreement, since they cannot transfer the copyrights from someone else to Canonical, nor give the additional rights that the "contributor agreement" requests.
So, a GPL patch from someone that doesn't sign the agreement is incompatible with their license.
Community contributions and copyright assignment Posted Oct 29, 2009 10:46 UTC (Thu) by intgr (subscriber, #39733) [Link]
I think that is what user ewan suggested and I entirely agree with it. Other distributions should make a fork that Canonical cannot make use of. If the patches contributed to this fork are significant enough, it might end up convincing Canonical to drop the copyright assignment.
Community contributions and copyright assignment Posted Oct 29, 2009 14:39 UTC (Thu) by pjones (subscriber, #31722) [Link]
That's not as optimal as you might think. For one thing, we'd rather James kept working on it, whereas with X.org there was a bit more of a line in the sand.
Community contributions and copyright assignment Posted Nov 6, 2009 0:17 UTC (Fri) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]
And the guy who started x.org was the guy who'd actually done 90% of the work on XFree - he just got fed up with leadership being all mouth and no trousers. The change of licence was the last straw.
Cheers,
Community contributions and copyright assignment Posted Nov 6, 2009 13:37 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
A lot of people worked on XFree. It's true that Keith did an awful lot,
but so did a lot of other people.
(He *had* been around in the X world forever, though, since 1989 I think.
Community contributions and copyright assignment Posted Oct 31, 2009 9:21 UTC (Sat) by liljencrantz (subscriber, #28458) [Link]
That hardly seems optimal to me. I'd _much_ rather see a revised copyright assignment policy from Canonical, and I don't think that is out of the question.
Beer? Posted Oct 29, 2009 3:02 UTC (Thu) by frazier (guest, #3060) [Link]
...and about the beer? I was in Germany recently and it was most obvious that their average beer was far superior to the average beer in the U.S., but what I couldn't determine was who had the best beer, or if such a determination is even possible.
Beer? Posted Oct 29, 2009 13:59 UTC (Thu) by Trou.fr (subscriber, #26289) [Link]
Belgium, by far (if you like tasty and strong beers).
Beer? Posted Nov 6, 2009 0:18 UTC (Fri) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]
What about PROPER English ale?
The reason Brits drink warm beer is that you can actually TASTE the stuff. Most american beer is served chilled, so it anaesthetises the mouth so you can't taste the (lack of) flavour.
Cheers,
Beer? Posted Oct 29, 2009 14:18 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] Results are fuzzy, and my notes are incomplete. It seems that more research will be required...
Beer? Posted Oct 29, 2009 18:53 UTC (Thu) by JoeF (guest, #4486) [Link]
Most of the stuff sold as beer in the US is pretty much colored water.
As somebody who grew up in Europe, I would put Germany, Belgium, and the Czech Republic in the top three, in no particular order.
Beer in Spain Posted Oct 30, 2009 7:29 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] Spain is not usually associated with good beer, but we have some pretty strong brands. After I've been abroad and enjoyed multiple varieties, I always come back to my Mahou with delight (and a bit of surprise that it is still the best I've tasted). Ambar from Zaragoza is also very good -- their latest International Expo (dedicated to water) ads said "you will come for the water, you will return for the beer". San Miguel sells very well abroad and it is not bad.As to keg beer, in most of Andalucía they tend to serve a disgusting yellowish stuff, beware; but in the center (esp. Madrid) you will see in most bars a lot of glasses filled with the most delicious golden liquid. It tastes even better than it looks. In short, I hope that if our editor ever comes here (or has already) he will get a fair sampling of our goods, so that we get a fair place in the competition.
Beer? Posted Nov 11, 2009 23:45 UTC (Wed) by rstanley (guest, #49163) [Link]
There are two descriptions of American Beer (Lager) that I will always remember. Both are quoted from Brits:
"Gassed up weasel water!" (Unknown London resident)
"American beer is like making love in a canoe! It's f%$#*&g close to water!" (Monty Python) ;^)
Fortunately, there are a large number of Micro Breweries here in the US that DO know what real Beer/Ale/Bitter/Porter/etc... are.
Determining what country produces the best beer is not only very subjective, but such an ongoing process, that the final answer may never be known! ;^)
Community contributions and copyright assignment Posted Oct 29, 2009 3:36 UTC (Thu) by dkite (guest, #4577) [Link]
Being a curmudgeon, something irked me about Ubuntu and it's message. I
thought it was me.
Now I see that the emphasis on community instead of community being a result
I enjoy a working environment where the word 'team' is uttered in derision,
I'm pleased to see the push back here.
Derek
Community contributions and copyright assignment Posted Oct 29, 2009 18:18 UTC (Thu) by lysse (guest, #3190) [Link]
> I enjoy a working environment where the word 'team' is uttered in derision
Are they hiring?
Community contributions and copyright assignment Posted Oct 30, 2009 5:03 UTC (Fri) by frazier (guest, #3060) [Link]
The push back works sometimes. I think we all remember the QT license bit where there was the GPL/commercial split. Nokia came in and solved that with LGPL licensing, and there was incentive for them to make the change with chunks of the community using other software with fairer licensing.
Advice appreciated on community contributions approach Posted Oct 29, 2009 6:52 UTC (Thu) by kripkenstein (subscriber, #43281) [Link]
Interesting article, and coincidentally relevant to a project of mine. I won't spam you with a link, but here is the approach I am considering doing, I would appreciate comments:
1. My own code in this project is AGPL.
In other words, I am already bundling code with compatible licenses in this project, and people submitting new code under a compatible license is basically like more such code. Or, if they aren't comfortable with a permissive license like Apache or zlib, they can use the AGPL, but then I guess they need to trust me regarding other licenses I use it for.
Does this seem like a fair arrangement? Also, is any project already doing something like this (I can't seem to think of one)? I hope there isn't some fatal flaw I am missing.
Advice appreciated on community contributions approach Posted Oct 29, 2009 8:34 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
Dual licensing is rather problematic both from the community perspective as well as a business arrangement. Over time, even projects like MySQL have been getting more revenue from traditional support and services as opposed to selling proprietary licenses. Trolltech changed from GPL to LGPL for Qt as well. What happens if there is a very good piece of AGPL licensed code that the author is unwilling to submit to you under your copyright license agreement?
Why not just require that all contributions must be permissively licensed and skip everything else. IIUC, that's what drizzle, a fork of MySQL does and it seems they are very successful is getting community contributors compared to MySQL.
Advice appreciated on community contributions approach Posted Oct 29, 2009 9:09 UTC (Thu) by kripkenstein (subscriber, #43281) [Link]
Thanks, I wasn't aware of Drizzle's interesting contributions approach. I will consider adopting it. (But maybe with AGPL/Apache as opposed to Drizzle's GPL/BSD? Need to think about it.)
Advice appreciated on community contributions approach Posted Oct 29, 2009 12:22 UTC (Thu) by sandmann (subscriber, #473) [Link]
Would it be possible to come up with a scheme where contributors were compensated if the code were ever to be relicensed commercially?
Ie., have them sign something that said "you can relicense it, but you'll have to pay $x to J. Hacker".
Advice appreciated on community contributions approach Posted Oct 29, 2009 12:58 UTC (Thu) by kripkenstein (subscriber, #43281) [Link]
I am sure that is possible, at least in theory, but it might have practical issues.
For example, if you want to relicense a few years later, and can't get ahold of all the original contributors to pay them, that would be problematic. Or if something happened to them you need to find their next of kin.
Maybe it could work in this way: If you relicense, you need to publicly advertise that fact, and the authors then have the option to contact you for $X within 1 year from the announcement.
Not sure how I feel about that approach, though. For one thing, would it be $X per contributor? Then 1,000 lines of patches are the same as 1? Or is it by lines of code? Seems troubling either way.
Advice appreciated on community contributions approach Posted Nov 6, 2009 0:23 UTC (Fri) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]
I've been thinking what I'd do.
I suspect I'd settle for "you give me the right to exempt people from the requirement to provide source, provided the binaries are unmodified".
That way, I could licence commercial companies to sell a binary-only, "proprietary" product, but they would lose the right to make proprietary changes. If they wanted to change the source, they would have to give their changes to me for me to make them freely available, in order to be able to distribute their changes.
Cheers,
I see no problems Posted Oct 29, 2009 9:02 UTC (Thu) by cate (subscriber, #1359) [Link]
I really see no problems.
AFAIK (IANAL) the moral right cannot be assigned/transferred, and AFAIK using
Thus: IMO Canonical cannot distribute a non-free version of Upstream.
PS: This is probably a lot European-centric, but considering that a lot of
I see no problems Posted Oct 29, 2009 9:13 UTC (Thu) by amikins (guest, #451) [Link]
In other portions of the world (US in particular) Canonical's agreement is
actually as problematic as our editor explains. Europe's concept of 'moral rights' does not exist in the US, and is not a dominant concept throughout the world (although it does show up in other areas if I remember correctly).
I see no problems Posted Oct 29, 2009 9:23 UTC (Thu) by cate (subscriber, #1359) [Link]
Yes, but in a collaborative project it is enough to have some "European"
developers to block proprietary changes. And fortunately this block is valid in all the world.
I see no problems Posted Oct 29, 2009 10:51 UTC (Thu) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]
How about European projects such as QT and MySQL? How does a similar agreement work for them?
I see no problems Posted Oct 29, 2009 10:14 UTC (Thu) by johill (subscriber, #25196) [Link]
The author's intentions don't matter -- the agreement will surely include a clause that hands over all _usage_ rights of the code, iow. the moral authorship right doesn't matter.
This is how coding/etc. for money works in Europe too -- you retain your moral rights, but your employer gets _all_ usage rights, which typically includes taking those right away from you so that while you can still claim authorship of the code, you cannot use it in any way.
I see no problems Posted Oct 29, 2009 10:36 UTC (Thu) by cate (subscriber, #1359) [Link]
I don't agree (IANAL). The purpose and the intention are important. And no,
you cannot give the *all* usages. (see the curt rules about moral rights)
For a usual software job the usage of a work is nearly clear; but OTOH I'm
I've some more doubts with the change from free to proprietary license.
But if I'm active in free software movement (code and philosophy), if I'm
Anyway IANAL
Irrelevant argument Posted Oct 29, 2009 16:49 UTC (Thu) by southey (subscriber, #9466) [Link]
The person has knowingly given Canonical ownership of the code. There is nothing in the agreement to keep the code non-free nor to keep the author's intentions. So Canonical can do what it likes with it.
Just send in a patch ... Posted Oct 29, 2009 10:45 UTC (Thu) by addw (guest, #1771) [Link]
and alongside it include a note saying that the patch is copyright you and that you release it under the GPL. If/when canonical come back asking you to sign their agreement - just refuse and point out that your patch already has a perfectly good license. It is then up to them to accept the patch or not.
It would be stupid of them to refuse to accept it since much of what they are working with is already under the GPL.
Just send in a patch ... Posted Oct 29, 2009 23:45 UTC (Thu) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] It would be stupid of them to refuse to accept it since much of what they are working with is already under the GPL. I believe the article says refuse to accept it is exactly what Canonical will do, stupid or not. And it mentions a few reasons that it might not be stupid. It would be a waste of time to send in a patch to someone who has made it clear he won't use code to which you hold the copyright. And FSF has been rejecting code like that forever too.
Community contributions and copyright assignment Posted Oct 30, 2009 1:55 UTC (Fri) by zooko (subscriber, #2589) [Link]
I wonder about one thing though: you mentioned some people who were uncomfortable with this situation, and I believe you that you really talked to such people over beer. But aren't some other people perfectly happy to contribute to a codebase which might be additionally relicensed under a proprietary licence?
Whenever people contribute work to my project -- Tahoe-LAFS -- I ask them (a) can we please have it under the same terms that we distribute Tahoe-LAFS under (which are Free Software and Open Source), and (b) can we please also have a license to use it however we wish including proprietary relicensing. Also I tell them that we will immediately release their contributions under our Free Software/Open Source licensing terms as soon as their contributions hit our revision control repository.
Everybody so far has said yes to (a) and all but two contributors so far have said yes to (b).
Community contributions and copyright assignment Posted Oct 30, 2009 15:25 UTC (Fri) by dkg (subscriber, #55359) [Link]
but both a and b, as far as i can tell from what you've written, are asking for copyright licenses, not copyright assignment.
That is, with (a) you're asking your contributors for the right to use, modify, and redistribute their code under the same terms that you've offered them for your code. no one is going to balk at that if they're sending you patches already.
and with (b), you seem to again be asking for a *license*, not an assignment. Canonical (according to the article) is actually asking contributors to sign over the proprietorship of the code itself, along with a broad patent grant, all for the privilege of having the code included in their version of the tools.
i think that's a different deal.
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