Ubuntu developer summit [LWN.net]

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