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Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free softwareMark Shuttleworth on companies and free softwarePosted May 17, 2011 16:12 UTC (Tue) by josh (subscriber, #17465)Parent article: Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
People often use "ideology" as a negative term when referring to the beliefs of those who disagree with their own ideology.
Going faster doesn't help if you go in the wrong direction. Disagreements on methodology like this often represent disagreements about the desired destination.
That said, if a company wants to use a contributor agreement so they can own all the copyrights on a project so they can dual-license it under a proprietary license, by all means they should continue to do so. However, don't whitewash it by claiming it has any purpose other than supporting proprietary licensing, and don't complain when it causes some people to avoid contributing, either because they don't want to sign the agreement or because they can't.
Sun actually had one of the better contributor agreements around, at least later on: they switched from a copyright assignment to a joint copyright assignment, in which both Sun and the contributor continued to hold independent copyrights over the contributed code. That kind of agreement I can live with, and I evaluate it the same way I'd evaluate contributing under an all-permissive license.
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Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software Posted May 17, 2011 16:43 UTC (Tue) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]
One of the outcomes of a loan is that the recipient typically has to give it back at some stage. How is this even vaguely analogous?
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software Posted May 19, 2011 9:03 UTC (Thu) by dneary (subscriber, #55185) [Link]
The disconnect comes from how you think of a patch.
One patch into a big body of code could be considered a gift.
But the GPL sees it more like a merger. Or a partnership. The whole is a combination of two works.
If it's a gift, then it's uncouth of the giver to impose demands on how the gift be used. By giving, he renounces all claim to decide what happens to it. If you give me a book as a gift, and I decide to wipe my arse with it, that's my right. Of course, if I did that, I presumably wouldn't be getting any more gifts from you.
If, on the other hand, we're talking about a merger or partnership, that's different. One patch is more like a gift, but a major feature (say) is more like a pooling of resources to make something better for both of us. In that case, it's reasonable that you have a say in the development of your feature and perhaps on the overall direction of the project too.
A real life example might be a couple moving in together. You bring the TV, I bring the microwave, we both get full use of everything. If you were living in the apartment on your own before, you have probably made some decisions already (ISP, phone & utilities providers, etc), but if we decide on any new stuff then we decide together. Of course, you might have a room in the house that's all yours, and if you want to install a pinball machine beside the pool table in your games room, I won't stop you, but if you want to put it in the bedroom, I might want to have some input into the decision.
Of course, there's a huge middle ground between a simple small patch ("I bought you a pot plant") and an equal partnership of living together... and the amount of control one can expect depends on the investment of each party into the shared whole.
Dave.
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software Posted May 19, 2011 15:41 UTC (Thu) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]
> there's a huge middle ground between a simple small patch ("I bought you a pot plant") and an equal partnership of living together...
I'm not sure a gift with such far-reaching implications (possession being illegal and all) is analogous to "a small simple patch". Or did you mean "potted plant"?
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software Posted May 19, 2011 15:46 UTC (Thu) by dneary (subscriber, #55185) [Link]
> I'm not sure a gift with such far-reaching implications (possession being
> illegal and all) is analogous to "a small simple patch". Or did you mean > "potted plant"?
:-) It was a patent encumbered patch.
Dave.
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software Posted May 23, 2011 7:21 UTC (Mon) by fabsh (subscriber, #61595) [Link]
You could always turn down the gift if you think it's not worth it. As in real life, you aren't required to take a gift.
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software Posted May 17, 2011 16:59 UTC (Tue) by wlach (subscriber, #23397) [Link]
I would add that Sun was very clear about why they required the JCA: so they could release a commercial product with the end result (StarOffice). It was and is really unclear to me why Canonical wants full copyright over its various projects: this lack of transparency can't help but foster mistrust.
It's also a serious misrepresentation of the facts to say that LibreOffice forked solely because of a "radical faction" that refused to contribute code under Sun's agreement. That was certainly a factor, but it was far from being the only or even the most important one: my experience was that the project's internal processes made it incredibly difficult for a third party to contribute to the project, with or without signing the JCA.
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software Posted May 17, 2011 20:14 UTC (Tue) by AlexHudson (subscriber, #41828) [Link]
I would go further than say "misrepresentation". I don't know where Shuttleworth got that version of events, but it is so radically different to the public record and so offensive in content it deserves either good evidence in favour of it or a public apology.
And the argument just doesn't make any sense. "Oracle were so hurt by the fork that they laid off their active development team and now the project is much less active" is a ridiculous notion. Were Oracle really so bothered by ~20 or so hackers of varying skill that they immediately laid off their 100-strong team?
And the "factionalists" who caused this, who are they? I imagine he's talking about people like Michael Meeks, who is a deeply admirable fellow (whose company I've had the pleasure of a number of times) who I'm sure was key to the split.
Call me a conspiracy theorist, but Meeks is also the author of a particularly well-argued piece on Contributor Agreements and why they don't work well. I find it strange and co-incidental that Shuttleworth would fling some random poo in his direction at the same time while he's trying to talk up his Contributor Agreement project "Harmony".
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software Posted May 18, 2011 9:39 UTC (Wed) by misc (subscriber, #73730) [Link]
I would not call you a conspiracy theorist. In fact, that's likely valid to some extend. If you see someone opinion as being wrong ( like I guess Mark have seen the one of Michael ), you will have a negative first mpression on what this person do later, and thus be biased on his initiative. That's human, Mark just act like all others person on this planet, and that's likely a subconscient reaction. See "confirmation bias" on Wikipedia, and various others bias.
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