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Ubuntu developer summitUbuntu developer summitPosted May 11, 2011 19:10 UTC (Wed) by AlexHudson (subscriber, #41828)Parent article: Ubuntu developer summit
"If someone gave you a plant for your garden, but asked you to agree not to sell the house if you accepted it, you likely wouldn't agree to that, he said. "It would not be generous on their part"." I suppose that pretty much spells it out, right there. "This is my garden. Feel free to trim my hedge once a week, but, y'know, remember this is all mine". I wonder how many people were under the impression they were working on some kind of community park, not the backyard to Mark's house.
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Ubuntu developer summit Posted May 11, 2011 19:29 UTC (Wed) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link]
I wonder how many people realize that even community parks still have owners and a select few people who end up responsible in legal situations and who have to foot the bill for basic maintenance if the community gets bored or busy with another project?
Hey, stretching metaphors out of context is fun!
Ubuntu developer summit Posted May 11, 2011 20:00 UTC (Wed) by AlexHudson (subscriber, #41828) [Link]
If you think that's stretching a metaphor, fine. I think what Mark has said is pretty transparently clear; he wants clear rights and title to "his stuff".
Ubuntu developer summit Posted May 11, 2011 20:43 UTC (Wed) by hingo (guest, #14792) [Link] Yup, and he even gives away the end game: selling the house. It's just an unfortunate fact that acquirers of Canonical will value the company higher, if they see it owning some of that valuable IPR. Some of that value is so called "imaginary property", meaning it doesn't mean anything. But some of the value comes from the fact that whoever acquires Canonical will then have the legal right to turn that code into proprietary software.If Mark was just asking us to donate copyrights to his company, sure, I might not even mind. I never paid any money to Canonical despite having used Kubuntu for so many years. So I could give back by donating code. But I think it is just wrong to reach out to your Free Software and Open Source community and ask them to give you their Free Software, so that you can make proprietary software out of it. I know I couldn't stand there making such an appeal.
Proprietary software and your open source contributions Posted May 13, 2011 0:25 UTC (Fri) by kiko (subscriber, #69905) [Link]
Having seen the Canonical plans inside and out from various teams within the company (and having Mark as a friend for years) I can tell you that the risk of Canonical proprietary software being created out of the community's open source contributions is pretty much zero. It's just that Mark is a bit of a neat freak. He often worries about complicated, long-term risks and likes the idea of creating process to clean up things which he considers messy. I don't know whether his contributor agreement vision is practical enough to be successful, but he has proven me wrong enough times that I usually give Mark the benefit of the doubt.
Proprietary software and your open source contributions Posted May 13, 2011 6:01 UTC (Fri) by hingo (guest, #14792) [Link] I'm not worried that Canonical would create proprietary software. Sure, I wasn't worried about MySQL AB either until I realized that was exactly what the execs had been busy doing... But yes, the point is not whether to trust Mark or not.What I see as a likely path here is that eventually Canonical is sold, and the new owner will create proprietary software. I think this is particularly likely because of the mobile device markets you are targeting. And even creating proprietary software isn't wrong in itself, but wrt the contributor agreement in particular I think it is very wrong now to advocate FOSS hackers to sign over copyrights, appealing to them trusting Mark to be a good guy, when in fact the likelihood is quite big that eventually Canonical code can be used to create proprietary software.
Proprietary software and your open source contributions Posted May 13, 2011 6:44 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
Mark knows that contributor agreements can be crafted with language which would act as a binding promise-back which would constrain Canonical or any copyright holder Canonical sold copyrights to from using contributed code in a proprietary fashion. Its contract language, and it can be crafted. He knows this.
If Canonical really wanted to take future proprietary re-licensing off the table they could craft the language of their agreement to do exactly that.
But no, that's not what they are doing. They very much want the keep the option of proprietary relicensing open. Even if Canonical under current ownership doesn't ever use the ability to do that, the current management teams sees a long term financial benefit in keep the ability to proprietary relicense in play to entice future investment from others.
Canonical sees the ability to proprietary relicense as a strategic business benefit in the long term even if they current management doesn't have plans to actually make use of that ability. If Mark sold Canonical in a year, would you trust the new owners to not relicense? I don't see this current management team being able to put 100+ million Ubuntu systems in play in 4 years time. If that goal is going to happen, Canonical is going to get sold to another entity with a much sharp business focus. And that very well could be proprietary re-licensing of Canonical built tech.
Mark wants everyone to trust him..to trust Canonical like somehow Canonical is a personification of his personal interests. It is not. It is a for-profit entity and being such may very well end up under the control of people with very different personal interests at some point in the future. Mark has a very short memory about this important aspect of the lifecycle of corporate entities. Considering he made his big cash pile by selling his previous successful corporate venture to a much larger entity he should know full well that one of the end-games for Canonical first management team is a lucrative strategic buy-out by another management team. No contributor should make the mistake of forgetting that possible future, no matter how charismatic, charming, friendly or downright human Mark is. End-of-the-day, you aren't handing over your copyrights to the man, you are handing over your copyrights to a corporation.
-jef
Ubuntu developer summit Posted May 11, 2011 20:50 UTC (Wed) by aliguori (subscriber, #30636) [Link]
Your assertion is that because certain individuals do a disproportionate amount of work, they should get a disproportionate amount of rights to the software.
But that is not the nature of Free Software. The entire philosophy of Free Software is that everyone should have equal rights to software regardless of who participated in it's creation. Full stop.
There is simply no way you can reconcile contributor agreements with the philosophy of Free Software.
Use a different license that explicitly gives your organization special rights. Don't try to misappropriate Free Software licenses by having a secondary agreement to sign.
Ubuntu developer summit Posted May 11, 2011 21:02 UTC (Wed) by jg (subscriber, #17537) [Link]
Independent of any equity arguments in any direction, I believe contributor agreements are usually a real mistake, and should be avoided whenever possible.
1) getting them "right" is very hard. I would not/could not sign the Fedora agreement for years due to language that made it unclear exactly what I might be signing away rights to. At the time, I was on the X.org board, and that agreement was written in a way at that time that made it unclear if I might be speaking on behalf of the parent upstream organization, X.org (as opposed to whatever Fedora specific work I might be doing for which I have little problems giving RH rights to).
2) if you work for a corporation, you will usually have to have the agreements reviewed by legal counsel; and it effectively doubles the amount of legal effort to get something "over the wall" to benefit anyone. The inertial barrier is already high enough. And with the problems I covered in 1), you can get into dread "lawyer wait", where no one wants to take any responsibility for their actions, or because the agreement is just hard to understand and therefore review is not timely.
If you are just publishing code under a "standard" major open source license, then legal departments generally don't have to understand the licenses again and again; they internalize the specific licenses.
So contributor agreements between contributors (in a company) to a project like Ubuntu means that we go from a order N problem (of licenses) to add contributor agreements to each project that requires them.
Ubuntu developer summit Posted May 11, 2011 22:10 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
I am assuming you are talking about
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal:Licenses/CLA
It was based on Apache CLA and had some additional unneeded complexity.
FWIW, the new agreement is at
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal:Fedora_Project_Contr...
Should be straight forward and simple.
Ubuntu developer summit Posted May 11, 2011 21:14 UTC (Wed) by dmadsen (guest, #14859) [Link]
Hmmm...
How about I give you a plant for your garden -- which you've made public so that anyone can enjoy it -- under the condition that you don't close your garden to the public or charge an entrance fee that some couldn't afford? Is that unreasonable?
If I'm to be REALLY generous and not have any conditions on my plant gift, perhaps I should stick a "BSD" stake in the pot?
Ubuntu developer summit Posted May 12, 2011 0:40 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
> I wonder how many people were under the impression they were working on some kind of community park, not the backyard to Mark's house.
I wonder when people will stop insulting and twisting the words of somebody who has donated a significant amount of his personal fortune in a attempt to make Linux software friendly and easy to use.
I know nobody is going to like this, but: You should try to be a bit more kind and understanding in the future because right now you sound a lot like a dick.
Ubuntu developer summit Posted May 12, 2011 0:41 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Sorry, donated is not the right term. I meant invested.
Ubuntu developer summit Posted May 12, 2011 6:54 UTC (Thu) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]
I think "donated" will turn out to be correct. I don't expect him to recover the investment, ever. I don't expect that he minds, either, so long as he stays sufficiently solvent to continue doing what he enjoys.
Ubuntu developer summit Posted May 12, 2011 8:35 UTC (Thu) by AlexHudson (subscriber, #41828) [Link]
I have a huge amount of respect for Mark, but that doesn't translate into automatically giving him latitude where I disagree with him. You'll notice I didn't personally attack *him*, I voiced disagreement with what he said.
I find that works better than name-calling. YMMV.
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