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Dual Licencing and Central Copyright Holders.Dual Licencing and Central Copyright Holders.Posted Oct 18, 2010 23:10 UTC (Mon) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784)In reply to: Dual Licencing and Central Copyright Holders. by jspaleta Parent article: Kuhn: Canonical, Ltd. Finally On Record: Seeking Open Core
2009: Nokia drops copyright-assignment completely on Qt and moves to a contributor agreement that is a based on a license from the external contributor to Nokia. I think this highlights a very serious objection to copyright assignment obligations: that contributors who may well have a firm opinion on the licensing of their own work must relinquish control (to the party requesting copyright assignment) over how such work is licensed. Although this doesn't matter too much to people who apply permissive licences to their work - you can read the "but you can still make your own code available yourself" defence familiar from permissive licence advocacy in Canonical's agreement - it has the effect of taking works that are (or would otherwise be) available under, say, copyleft terms and effectively making them permissively licensed (or worse). Thus, such "agreements" are like saying, "Well, we know that the project in question is GPL-licensed and that you feel that this is most appropriate for your contributions, but we want the ability to disregard all that, because we might not share your concerns or even respect your views after all." At least contributions based on licensing preserve a decent level of transparency and respect for all involved.
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Dual Licencing and Central Copyright Holders. Posted Oct 19, 2010 11:44 UTC (Tue) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link] The standard reply to this train of thought is: the Free Software Foundation also thinks copyright assignment is a good idea. And the FSF are the good/bad [*] guys.Surely sensible things can be said about the pros and cons of copyright assignment, or lack thereof, especially in the bigger scheme of things -- but contributing code to a project you didn't start without reading the conditions that govern code contribution is just as silly as accepting any contribution to a project you did start without checking its license and copyright. [*] Pick one.
Dual Licencing and Central Copyright Holders. Posted Oct 19, 2010 12:10 UTC (Tue) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link] The standard reply to this train of thought is: the Free Software Foundation also thinks copyright assignment is a good idea. Which is mentioned in the article as a means to divert criticism of a particular form of copyright assignment by claiming that others doing something similar are actually doing the same thing if you squint hard enough. The crucial difference is what the people wanting your copyright promise (or don't promise) to do once they have it. Surely sensible things can be said about the pros and cons of copyright assignment, or lack thereof, especially in the bigger scheme of things -- but contributing code to a project you didn't start without reading the conditions that govern code contribution is just as silly as accepting any contribution to a project you did start without checking its license and copyright. Sure, which is why people quite often take their ball away and start their own game somewhere else, as the experiences of Sun Microsystems can surely attest.
Dual Licencing and Central Copyright Holders. Posted Oct 19, 2010 16:11 UTC (Tue) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
And the standard rebuttal to this train of thought is that the FSF makes a legally binding promise not to take any of the code it has copyright control over proprietary in the language of the copyright assignment contract you sign with the FSF.
Such legally binding promises come in many forms. Granted, the FSF's promise-back is incompatible with proprietary dual licensing. But there are other "promise-back" forms which can be used by businesses who do want to engage in proprietary dual-licensing which still consider contributor interests and are not one-side landgrabs by a central authority. The FSF even proposes a clause that allows for proprietary dual-licensing that contributors can agree to. See this article:
And as I've already written elsewhere a promise-back can take the form of a latching agreement between the central authority and a 3rd party which would provide for re-licensing that would open up the business opportunities to new parties if the central entity does something egregious such as shuttering the development of the open codebase. As is the case with the agreement between Trolltech and the Free KDE Free Qt Foundation.
The devil is always in the details. And yes, on its face the idea of standardizing some of this legal language seems like a good idea, but it could also go very wrong. If Project Harmony ends up institutionalizing an effort to legitimize a blanket copyright assignment policy to a central authority..then I will consider to have been a failure. There must be a sincere effort to craft _standard_ contributor agreements that equitably balances the business interests and contributor interests. A blanket copyright assignment policy like the one Canonical is currently following does not balance those interests.
-jef
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