Dual Licencing and Central Copyright Holders.

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:
http://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/assigning-copyright

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