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Project Harmony

Project Harmony

Posted Oct 20, 2010 10:21 UTC (Wed) by sladen (subscriber, #27402)
In reply to: "A buzzword that has no agreed upon meaning" by pboddie
Parent article: Kuhn: Canonical, Ltd. Finally On Record: Seeking Open Core

I (personally) find the Canonical Contributor agreement to be sub-optimal in its current state (which is the reason why I have not signed it).

I don't find its sub-optimalability to be a reason for publishing a sensational hypothesis, the better and pragmatic approach is probably to try and actually do something about fixing it, constructively.
"...seeking guidance about what is normal or typical around collaborating with others on such a basis."
If my recollection is correct, Canonical are underwriting just such an initiative, called (for want of a better name), "Project Harmony"—where the intent is not to discuss the perceived merits (or disadvantages) of Copyright assignment, but on how to make the process annoy the least number of people when it does crop up.


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Project Harmony

Posted Oct 20, 2010 11:42 UTC (Wed) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]

I don't find its sub-optimalability to be a reason for publishing a sensational hypothesis, the better and pragmatic approach is probably to try and actually do something about fixing it, constructively.

Well, it looks like an open-and-shut case to me: Canonical's position is that there's no other way that would work on a global basis, so that's the way it is. As for sensationalism, there's a single contributor agreement for a huge list of projects which, aside from various valid points made elsewhere about balancing project and contributor interests according to each project's specific profile, looks like quite a land grab at first glance.

If my recollection is correct, Canonical are underwriting just such an initiative, called (for want of a better name), "Project Harmony"—where the intent is not to discuss the perceived merits (or disadvantages) of Copyright assignment, but on how to make the process annoy the least number of people when it does crop up.

Sure, lots of projects usually decide to adopt some kind of contributor agreement, and it arguably makes sense to prevent "agreement proliferation", but the agreement in question isn't a great advertisement for the company leading such an initiative. And they could have waited until the eventual demise of Apache Harmony before stealing its name.

Project Harmony

Posted Oct 20, 2010 13:19 UTC (Wed) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]

Given how completely *unharmonious* Apache Harmony was (due to choosing a license that made it impossible to share code with the other already existing free Java class libraries), I'd be rather wary of copying its name at all. :)

Project Harmony

Posted Oct 21, 2010 21:37 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Calling a project 'Harmony' is like calling a project 'Open*': a guarantee of acrimony. (Open* is also a guarantee of a considerable degree of closedness.)

Project Harmony

Posted Oct 21, 2010 23:38 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

This is like countries calling themselves »The Democratic People's Republic of Somewhere«. Chances are that such a place isn't in fact a republic (usually a dictatorship of sorts) and isn't particularly democratic, meaning that most people there don't get much of a say in what goes on, either.

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