Proprietary software and your open source contributions

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