Proprietary software and your open source contributions [LWN.net]

Proprietary software and your open source contributions

Posted May 13, 2011 6:01 UTC (Fri) by hingo (guest, #14792)
In reply to: Proprietary software and your open source contributions by kiko
Parent article: Ubuntu developer summit

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.

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