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Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership
Mark Shuttleworth's push for copyright assignment agreements takes an
interesting turn with this lengthy post
suggesting that contributors owe a project their copyrights since they are
dumping a maintenance load on that project. "So, one of the reasons
I'm happy to donate (fully and irreversibly) a patch to a maintainer, and
why Canonical generally does assign patches to upstreams who ask for it, is
that I think the rights and responsibilities of ownership should be
matched. If I want someone else to handle the work - the responsibility -
of maintenance, then I'm quite happy for them to carry the rights as
well. That only seems balanced. In the common case, that maintenance turns
out to be as much work as the original crafting of the patch, and frankly,
it's the 'boring work' part, while the fun part was solving the problem
immediately at hand."
(Log in to post comments)
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 22, 2011 16:57 UTC (Fri) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] I think that this argument makes sense for a small patch where the contributor just wants to get a problem fixed but doesn't really intend to be a long-term partner in the development of that code. The cleanest way to deal with such things is to waive copyright interest in the patch, so it's basically public domain. Then it is available to Mr. Shuttleworth, who insists on holding the copyright to his code, but also available to others who might want to fork.However, for more significant contributions, or in cases where a developer wants to repeatedly contribute to a free software project, contributing one's copyright can be more problematic. If the recipient is a nonprofit and commits to keeping the code as free software, that's one thing, and many find that acceptable (though some don't). But if the recipient is a corporation I would advise against it. As Russ Nelson once said, when I work on proprietary software I expect to be paid. If a for-profit corporation expects people to make significant contributions of code to it in particular, with terms that allow that company and solely that company to use the contribution as proprietary software, in most cases to pay for the privilege, unless the contributor figures that the tradeoff is worthwhile (probably yes for small bug fixes, probably no for major work).
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 22, 2011 16:59 UTC (Fri) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] Whoops, that should read "... in most cases it should expect to pay for the privilege"
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 22, 2011 22:17 UTC (Fri) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link]
Although people seem to get particularly hung up about the copyright holder being able to take the project propriety, that doesn't really seem to be the point. Copyright reserves all sorts of rights to the copyright holder and not all of them can be licensed. Pretending that you know now what will happen in the future is obviously futile.
Sure, copyright assignment seems a bad idea if it's a significant contribution and you're an active member of the project. But that will end, eventually everyone dies and the heirs probably don't care about your contributions, but copyright law does. The computing industry is young, but eventually we're going to get software projects that span generations and copyright ownership of dead or unreachable/unfindable people is going to become an issue.
I'm not sure if contributor agreements are necessarily the solution, but Mark is correct in pointing out the problems. Copyright reform may be the right way, but I'm not holding my breath.
Oh, and the maintenance burden of code is about 10 times effort it took to write it. If you don't believe this you obviously haven't maintained a very large project.
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 23, 2011 3:45 UTC (Sat) by jospoortvliet (subscriber, #33164) [Link]
The 'gplv2 or later' clause deal with most if not all of the future issues imho.
And contributions INCLUDE maintenance so pretending all maintenance has to be done by 'the project' (*company*) is dishonest (I'm not saying you do, but Shuttleworth seems to).
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 25, 2011 9:01 UTC (Mon) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] And contributions INCLUDE maintenance so pretending all maintenance has to be done by 'the project' (*company*) is dishonest (I'm not saying you do, but Shuttleworth seems to)Not always. Probably not most of the time. People who contribute a patch -- even a large, non-trivial one that adds significant features -- to an existing project are generally not expected to maintain that patch forever.
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 25, 2011 10:09 UTC (Mon) by ewan (subscriber, #5533) [Link]
No, but the point was not that when I give you a contribution it "includes maintenance", but that the set of all contributions contains patches that are maintenance effort, as well as patches that require ongoing maintenance effort. Indeed, I rather suspect that a lot of the 'drive by' patches that copyright assignment has such a chilling effect on are indeed maintenance ones, as people fix individual bugs that are bothering them.
It's a nonsense to suggest that all maintenance effort must come from the project/company and that contributors therefore somehow owe them for that.
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 25, 2011 15:51 UTC (Mon) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]
Sorry, I misunderstood that point. Yes, indeed contributions can be maintenance -- but I think most "maintenance" contributions would tend to be short (2-3 line) bugfixes (fixing buffer overflows, etc) and would not qualify for copyright protection in any case...
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 26, 2011 16:31 UTC (Tue) by jospoortvliet (subscriber, #33164) [Link]
It does take away from the claim that the company always has to maintain everything and community contributors are just having fun so they have less moral rights... While surely a random contributor dumping a huge feature happens, many start with small maintenance patches. And surely, doing documentation and 'the final touch' are hard to do in FOSS, they can be equally hard in the corporate world...
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 23, 2011 4:03 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
You don't need copyright assignment to solve this problem. GPLv3, AGPLv3 and LGPLv3 allows a project to designate a proxy to pick a version
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html#section14
If that doesn't solve the problem, assign copyright only with a guarantee in the legal agreement that they will continue to release your code under a free software license. FSF agreement have such a clause.
Canonical has been asked to do so and hasn't done that
http://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/assigning-copyright
http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/02/01/copyright-not-all-eq...
Besides, assigning your copyright to a commercial organization under a legal agreement that allows to release your code under a proprietary license (https://lwn.net/Articles/359013/) doesn't make maintenance any less easier. The gist of the argument seems to be that independent upstream projects would make more money, be more self sustaining and do better work if they all adopted copyright assignment (I guess harmony agreements will be promoted for this purpose) but I see no evidence for that and a lot of evidence that this overhead is just plain unacceptable for the majority.
Shuttleworth first promoted coordinated released schedules which hasn't panned out as intended apparently and this seems to be next agenda and this one will burn up a lot of goodwill and fail to accomplish anything material as well.
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 22, 2011 17:46 UTC (Fri) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] I think that a lot of the issue's Mr. Shuttleworth is arguing about, like the need to license code back to the author, are more easily dealt with by avoiding an explicit copyright assignment rather than requiring one. A project gets all the rights it needs for ordinary operations from its Free Software license; copyright assignment serves only to give the assignee extra rights beyond those spelled out in the license. The kind of corporate governance issues he discusses might be more easily dealt with by having some kind of contributor vote analogous to a shareholder vote in a corporation. Contributors would be assigned ownership shares proportional to their contribution to the project. Those shares could be used to vote on ordinary governance issues, like electing a project board, or extraordinary ones like relicensing. I don't know if that kind of management structure could be added on top of existing licenses or would have to be written into the terms of a new license, but it seems like a viable alternative to explicit license assignment terms.
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 28, 2011 21:38 UTC (Thu) by JanC_ (guest, #34940) [Link] I don't know if that kind of management structure could be added on top of existing licenses or would have to be written into the terms of a new license, but it seems like a viable alternative to explicit license assignment terms.I think it would be easiest to add such a "license to re-license under conditions A, B & C and with restrictions X, Y & Z" to a contributor agreement. No need to assign copyright for that (at least not in most jurisdictions AFAIK). And in some jurisdictions signing copyright over isn't (always) possible anyway--a measure to protect individuals against greedy corporations (apparently such abuse was quite common in the music industry at some time...).
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 22, 2011 18:06 UTC (Fri) by fhuberts (subscriber, #64683) [Link]
I think Shuttleworth doesn't understand a lot of things. Maintenance has absolutely NOTHING to do with copyright assignment!
When you get a patch for your project, someone else has actually done some of the maintenance for you, be glad and don't try to force that person to give his work to you without any strings attached.
If I contribute to a GPL project I sure as h**l don't want to give up my copyright and risk the project changing the license behind my back, which is appearently what Ubuntu seems to be aiming for.
Mark, you're living right in the middle of a large ecosystem and ignoring that system is ridiculous and actually deadly in the long term.
I don't understand what Canonical is trying to accomplish these last years. They're less and less contributing to the ecosystem and are actively diverging from it. All very counter-productive and wasted effort.
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 22, 2011 19:25 UTC (Fri) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]
Bah. I can understand why people like the MySQL guys want assignment -- you want to embed the database in your closed-source program, you pay for it (and thereby fund further work on the thing).
However, AFAIK there is no closed-source variant of Canonical's code. There hopefully never will be. So what's the point?
Free software means that everybody has the exact same rights. Assigning copyright to somebody means that the somebody in question has more rights than everybody else. Combine that with the GPL and you'll need to explain why you want these rights. So far, there has been zero content from Mark on that front.
I don't have many reasons for moving my systems back to Debian, but this is one of them. And it's a big one.
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 22, 2011 21:40 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
Wrong.
Landscape and UbuntuOne server side code are still closed and proprietary Canonical built codebases.
In fact Canonical even offers a Landscape server appliance codebase which you then run on your own on-premise hardware as a Landscape customer. The handful existing landscape customers who might be paying the $10k+ to use the appliance offering might not care about its proprietary nature but its false to say Canonical isn't dabbling in proprietary code offerings. That on-premises appliance is unquestionably proprietary.
And I'm not loading that with some sort of sneer. If Canonical is able to make a business out of proprietary licensing that helps sustain Ubuntu as a project (when none of their other previous business ideas have) then I can live with that as long as everyone faces up to that reality and we can normalize discussions accordingly.
-jef
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 22, 2011 23:41 UTC (Fri) by SEJeff (subscriber, #51588) [Link]
Jef,
For the first time ever, I have to say to you, "Well said sir."
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 23, 2011 4:06 UTC (Sat) by rahvin (subscriber, #16953) [Link]
Shuttleworth has been talking about proprietary Ubuntu for years. He's in this for the money people, he's been saying that for years. A couple years ago he ratcheted up the volume significantly about his desire that Ubuntu won't be draining his wallet anymore (losing money) and actually contributing to it (his wallet).
I have no doubt in my mind he wants to be the next Microsoft of the world and he thinks he can get there with Linux (he discussed this extensively in the early days). I also think he's the biggest sleeper threat to the Linux community that currently exists. I will coach that threat with the belief that he has no legal leg to stand on because of the GPL but when he inevitably turns to the lawyers to try to recover his "investment" from the community he's going to cause damage.
If he could, Ubuntu would be a closed source private distribution tomorrow IMO.
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 24, 2011 21:45 UTC (Sun) by sciurus (subscriber, #58832) [Link] From the Ubuntu website on October 14, 2004: Ubuntu will always be free of charge, and there is no extra fee for the "enterprise edition", we make our very best work available to everyone on the same Free terms.From the Ubuntu website today (accessed on July 24, 2011): Ubuntu is free. Always has been and always will be. From the operating system to security updates, storage to software.
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 24, 2011 22:14 UTC (Sun) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
First, let me point out that those statements are not legally binding. What is your recourse if at some point in time Canonical decided to build a proprietary product and brand it Ubuntu. Do you know where the sources are for the Ubuntu Light product that Dell demo'd at a UDS last year? I found the binary iso on Dell's support site, but the sources? I never found them. That's a bit worrying, but I let it slide because Dell never actually shipped a product with Ubuntu Light pre-installed and I'm not going to go beating down doors for sources for a failed product demo. That would just be adding insult to injury, and that's never been my intent.
Second of all, The UbuntuOne service stands an example of how Canonical can choose to re-intepret that statement to their benefit. UbuntuOne is not "free" not in price and not in terms of the foundational freedoms of the codebase running the backend service. And the use of the Ubuntu brand for the service has been somewhat controversial inside the Ubuntu community. The service components that Canonical runs are not open for contribution without an NDA, and yet its branded as Ubuntu. The UbuntuOne service as it is constructed and branded could be interpreted as breaking that promise. But again it doesn't really matter if they break the promise or not, as its not a legally binding promise, and there's no legal recourse anyone can take to make them abide by the promise.
Some would consider Canonical playing fast and loose with the Ubuntu brand when it comes to U1. But its an example of a larger problem we have as an ecosystem. We as a larger ecosystem have not really figured out yet what it means to be open in a world dominated by online services that are ultimately out of the control of the end-users. We are way behind the curve there. AGPL licensing is a stake in the ground in the debate, but we still don't have a strong consensus view in the space.
-jef
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 28, 2011 21:51 UTC (Thu) by JanC_ (guest, #34940) [Link]
I don't know where you live, but those statements about staying free are legally binding over here... (at least to some degree).
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 23, 2011 23:11 UTC (Sat) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]
"""And I'm not loading that with some sort of sneer."""
That'll be the day. Most everything you've ever said about Shuttleworth and Canonical has been with a sneer. It's simply that in certain instances you feel it's a better strategy to be more subtle about it.
Look. Ubuntu has succeeded in getting desktop Linux out to the masses in a way that Fedora has never been able to do. Do a "man-on-the-street" count, and most people would not know what Linux is. But of those who did, far more would recognize the name "Ubuntu" than would recognize "Fedora".
Fedora also has its strengths, in pushing new technology out. And RHEL is second to none in boring servers. (That's a sincere compliment to RHEL, BTW. I like RHEL.)
I'm sensing a huge "sour grapes" reaction emanating from the Fedora community. You and Rahul seem to be leading the charge. (Definitely, you come first. Rahul has been far less rabid about it.) But there is absolutely no reason for it. As a result of Ubuntu's success in its area, *more* people recognize "Fedora" today than would have otherwise. Even if Fedora's "market share" has declined.
Regarding the topic at hand, I've never been a fan of copyright assignment/joint copyright as a *requirement*, as FSF and Sun have practiced. But it's not hard to differentiate between genuine concern, and appropriating a situation as an opportunity to attack "The Enemy".
I would think less of Canonical if they were to begin requiring it. But it's probably best that a public dialog on the topic has been started. After all, not everyone thinks like I do.
-Steve Bergman
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 23, 2011 23:55 UTC (Sat) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
Uhm...
You seem to be very misinformed about the state of things.
Canonical has been requiring copyright assignment for years now. The continue to require it for bzr, upstart, unity and utouch as well as several other projects.
http://www.canonical.com/contributors
Canonical has in fact already turned away contributions for external contributors who would not sign the assignment agreement.
http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2010/09/copyright-assignments-...
And now that you know they are already engaged in this activity, I don't want you to think less of them. They are after all... only human...and they will make mistakes. But I would encourage you to lobby them to change this practice and find a way to meet their business interests without requirement assignment for unpaid contributors.
-jef
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 24, 2011 18:20 UTC (Sun) by Julie (✭ supporter ✭, #66693) [Link] Canonical has been requiring copyright assignment for years now. The continue to require it for bzr, upstart, unity and utouch as well as several other projects. http://www.canonical.com/contributors Thanks for the link, I can now see why I've been getting confused about the whole 'copyright assignment' issue. Up till now I thought 'copyright assignment' meant the transfer of copyright rights, but after looking at the CLA and the above webpage I can see it means more of a rights 'fork'.My first reaction was that this might make things all OK (the contributor continues to own the copyright, after all) but a trivial rethink suggests all sorts of baroque complications - one party continues to develop their contribution under one license and the other switches, the switcher uses a proprietary license under which the original contributor's work is eventually incorporated into a patented method, which leaves the first party in violation, etc, etc. Or the first party decides to assign copyrights to a third and fourth party too. Or canonical does, and so on... What a big mess, who would want all _that_. Doesn't this defeat the purpose of 'copyright' anyway?
Copyright Licence Agreement != Copyright Assignment Agreement Posted Jul 25, 2011 15:47 UTC (Mon) by sladen (subscriber, #27402) [Link] I think the more likely explanation here is that Julie has actually read the current Canonical CLA, where-as Jef perhaps hasn't: Requesting a transfer of copyrights is a fairly big step compared to simply requesting a permissive licence. I don't think it's helpful to blur or redefine the two terms. Julie: I would stick to your original understanding of the two separate terms!
Copyright Licence Agreement != Copyright Assignment Agreement Posted Jul 25, 2011 17:13 UTC (Mon) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
Indeed it has changed. When did it change to using harmony language? Was there a notification or any sort of announcement as to when they switched that I missed?
AND more important for everyone who previous agreed to the assignment language are they going to be given a chance to retroactively convert their contributions to the new agreement?
-jef
Copyright Licence Agreement != Copyright Assignment Agreement Posted Jul 25, 2011 17:46 UTC (Mon) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
Canonical seems to have switched silently to one of the Harmony agreements and this is a step up compared to the previous agreement however I would note that 2.1 grants the right to sublicense very broadly and 2.3 explicitly reserves the right to relicense the contributions under a proprietary license. So yes, you now get to keep your copyright but Canonical gets a very broad license to do pretty much whatever they want. In terms of clarity of purpose, this is indeed better.
Copyright Licence Agreement != Copyright Assignment Agreement Posted Jul 25, 2011 17:55 UTC (Mon) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
Rahul,
On first reading, isn't this very close to the older Fedora CLA before the participation agreement approach? The older Fedora CLA did give Red Hat broad sublicensing rights as well.
The big thing is, now that the assignment requirement is gone, you can actually sign this CLA as well as similar peer CLAs and continue to meet the "I own my contribution" requirment. The biggest problem with the assignment clause in any vendor's contributor agreement has always been the inability to then layer the same contributed code again under another vendor equivalent conditions. You can't have an ecosystem of assignment clauses. But you can have an ecosystem of broad licensing clauses.
Yes, it's not going to be optimal for every potential contributor, but its no longer a non-starter because of its exclusivity nature. I can live with this agreement and be a party to it, and still lobby for something better instead of having to stand outside and without contributions.
-jef
Copyright Licence Agreement != Copyright Assignment Agreement Posted Jul 25, 2011 18:31 UTC (Mon) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
Not a lawyer but cursory reading suggests the current as with the old Fedora CLA are both broadly based on the Apache CLA and have similar clauses. One important difference however is in how it is applied. Red Hat didn't require anyone to sign the Fedora CLA in order to contribute patches to projects it managed. While a similar CLA was being used in some other projects, that has been systematically dismantled, thanks in large part to Richard Fontana.
While the current agreement is a improvement, I hope Canonical drops this and just accepts contributions under standard free and open source licenses. If they want the right to relicense under proprietary licenses, they could just permissively license their projects.
Copyright Licence Agreement != Copyright Assignment Agreement Posted Jul 25, 2011 23:45 UTC (Mon) by rfontana (subscriber, #52677) [Link]
The old Fedora CLA was interpreted by the Fedora Project in a manner similar to its replacement (that is, the broad inbound copyright license grant for contributed code is a default that contributors can opt out of through explicit licensing). The language of the old Fedora CLA (not present in the ancestral Apache CLA) facilitated this interpretation; the same does not appear to be true of this Harmony permutation being used by Canonical.
I understand that for some developers a maximalist CLA seems more psychologically palatable than copyright assignment, because of the important symbolism of holding on to legal ownership of the contribution rather than transferring it, but the legal reality is that they are virtually the same thing.
Copyright Licence Agreement != Copyright Assignment Agreement Posted Jul 25, 2011 17:49 UTC (Mon) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
Yes, the new contributor agreement language seems much more reasonable. I really really hope they give everyone who signed on under the old agreement the chance to resign under the new language.
On first reading there is nothing in there that would prevent me from signing it. It appears to be nearly equivalent to CLAs I've already agreed to sign with regard to broad licensing granted Canonical while allowing me to keep ownership. This solves the biggest problem with the old agreement language from my personal POV. Unless I find a wrinkle on second reading that I'm not seeing now, I now have no personal grievance to withhold submitting patches since its so similar to conditions I have already agreed to from other vendors in the past.
So hats off to Canonical for taking a step in the right direction with the new language.
-jef
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 25, 2011 19:37 UTC (Mon) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
Julie,
It appears that Canonical switched the text of its agreement _after_ Shuttleworth wrote his blog entry that this comment track is under. He even refers to Canonical's policy as one based on assignment with a broad license back to the contributor. What he wrote doesn't make any sense at all if the new agreement was in effect on the date he wrote his blog entry.
A lot of what Shuttleworth is trying to argue about the need for ownership has been mooted by the unannounced change in agreement language. It's a bit disturbing really. Why would Shuttleworth go through all the trouble of standing up all the rhetoric about ownership if the plan with in mere days of the blog post was to silently switch over to a policy that no longer demands ownership at all? Very very confusing and highly irrational behavior for Shuttleworth and Canonical. And while I'm not unhappy with the change, I am concerned about the contradictory messages the unannounced change and the public post sends. Up till now everyone inside Canonical has been so very very good about staying on message. Even when they had to back peddle away from a policy decision they were on message in the retreat. The divergence between messaging and policy now is a little bit eyebrow raising and honestly I don't know what to think about it.
-jef
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 25, 2011 21:42 UTC (Mon) by Julie (✭ supporter ✭, #66693) [Link] It appears that Canonical switched the text of its agreement _after_ Shuttleworth wrote his blog entry that this comment track is under. Oops, how odd, I wonder if they told him... ;-)Thanks for the clarification.
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 25, 2011 22:14 UTC (Mon) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
Julie,
As far as I am aware, you are the first person to actually notice the change. I'm not aware that anyone inside the Canonical fenceline or inside the Ubuntu community were made aware of the change going live. If you happen to catch wind of a public announcement anywhere, please provide a link to it here so we can all get up to speed.
-jef
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 31, 2011 3:03 UTC (Sun) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]
I don't obsess upon these things. I used to. But I don't anymore.
I do note that whatever Canonical is doing, it seems to be working. They are far and away the most popular Linux desktop distribution. While other distros have priorities which end users must take the back seat to, Ubuntu pretty much puts users first.
Regarding the other side of things: developer contributions... if you don't like the terms, don't contribute. If you're OK with them, then do. Canonical is nothing if not pragmatic. Shuttleworth and Torvalds actually have quite a lot in common when you think about it.
Idealism combined with pragmatism is far more effective than simple idealism alone.
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 24, 2011 18:05 UTC (Sun) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
"But it's not hard to differentiate between genuine concern, and appropriating a situation as an opportunity to attack "The Enemy"."
This is a misdirection. I have been against copyright assignment without appropriate counter guarantees and I have questioned that regardless of whether it happened with Sun/Oracle and Openoffice.org, Novell and Evolution, Nokia and Qt or Canonical and upstart and all this has happened right here in LWN. Is there a genuine concern that the push for copyright assignment by Canonical is counter productive? Absolutely but more importantly I think copyright assignment isn't a way to make independent open source projects more profitable except if they engage in proprietary relicensing. If that is what we are talking about, let us be explicit about that.
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 22, 2011 19:20 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
That's ridiculous. If the patch is a maintenance burden out of proportion to its utility, the recipient project can always remove it. Having copyright won't help with that, nor will not having copyright make it harder to remove (nor the other way around).
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 24, 2011 19:01 UTC (Sun) by Julie (✭ supporter ✭, #66693) [Link] That's ridiculous. If the patch is a maintenance burden out of proportion to its utility, the recipient project can always remove it. Having copyright won't help with that, nor will not having copyright make it harder to remove (nor the other way around). True. And why assume that a contributor is (usually?) just going to dump the contribution and then disappear into the ether without any interest in taking on any further responsibility/involvement and that copyright assignment is some sort of solution (or consolation)? Mark's blog post seems to paint a picture of a real wall between would-be contributors and existing project developers, I wouldn't want to get involved with a project with that kind of atmosphere.That's not the way things work with kernel contributions. If something's likely to cause a maintenance burden out of proportion to its utility it stays out of the kernel (that's presumably partly what mailing lists and code reviews are for) until the contributor can provide an assurance that it's maintainable as well as a good idea and has a known user base (see Jon's recent post on checkpoint/restart). From following the development process I see that at the first sign of code needing attention everyone looks first at the original/last known contributing individual/team and expects them to take action or provide justification for not changing something. I get the feeling of real cooperative, responsible teamwork occurring. From time to time some stuff gets orphaned or the development responsibility for it changes hands but the kernel devs generally seem to cope - no copyright assignment necessary. Not for nothing is Linux kernel development held up as a model for FOSS development.
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 22, 2011 21:47 UTC (Fri) by landley (guest, #6789) [Link]
Shuttleworth is crazy.
Copyright assignment requires an explicit "written instrument of conveyance", on paper, with signature. This was an issue in the Novell vs SCO litigation about who owns the Unix copyrights, PJ covered it at length in Groklaw. The law _requires_ this, an oral contract is not sufficient here.
This means Shuttleworth wants to impose a massive bureaucratic burden on projects to maintain a physical file cabinet full of legal documents, and a massive bureaucratic burden on contributors to fill out a form and mail it in for permission to contribute to a project. You have to print out, sign, and mail a legal document, possibly overseas, and wait for it to arrive and be processed before your patch can go in.
This is one reason Linux leaped past the GNU project: copyright assignment was enough of a barrier that the friction caused by this discouraged drive-by contributions (nobody's going to fill out a form and mail it in to for a five minute patch), and those drive-bys are your future heavy contributors. That barrier to entry was enough to significantly discourage contributors and retard the growth of the gnu project's developer community. Remember, the FSF was the "cathedral" in the Cathedral and the Bazaar.
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 22, 2011 23:13 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
I don't think its fair to say he's crazy.
It would be fairer to say that he's under pressure to find new venture capital investors who will be willing to invest in the future of Canonical, as its still not a profitable venture and he's come to to realization that the amount of personal wealth he's allocated to get Canonical up on its feet is not going to be enough.
Put yourself in his shoes. He's got a company with 300+ people that he feels responsible for. He has probably millions of users of Ubuntu he feels responsible for. And there's isn't enough income coming in from OEM engineering/certification or Landscape services or cloud services or U1 to pay the bills...not even close to paying the bills. And you are watching Google consume more and more of the new fertile non-MS dominated mobile device OEM ground with Android and ChromeOS with passing heartbeat? Google who has leveraged your own product offering to build ChromeOS in fact and stopped being a paying engineering support customer. Google could lose money on Android and ChromeOS development for like 20 years and still be profitable. How does Canonical really compete with that in the OEM space with new investment capital and double-down on the work they are doing?
And where does he get that new invest capital... venture capital.
No, Shuttleworth isn't crazy.. but he's under pressure and he's narrowing his focus to look at what it will take to keep Canonical afloat and to keep the dream alive. And he wants everyone else to just play along and trust him in the hopes that it will all work out in the end. Even though as soon as their is significant extern VC capital in play funding Canonical, it won't really matter if we trust him or not..we have to trust the intersts of whatever VCs come in and save the day.
-jef
Turnabout is fairplay Posted Jul 23, 2011 5:26 UTC (Sat) by Priscus (subscriber, #72409) [Link]
Poor Mark Shuttleworth.
Google uses Canonical's work without paying, and leverages their money to leapfrog his own efforts.
That is exactly what he did to other distributions when dumping millions in Ubuntu.
I will not pretend I like it.
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 23, 2011 6:31 UTC (Sat) by kragilkragil2 (guest, #76172) [Link]
Umm, that would only be true if Mark was pumping more money into Canonical than he makes with Canonical and his investment activities.
I don't have numbers, but as it seems he is much better at predicting market trends and parking his wealth in lucrative things while other investors lost a lot than predicting reactions from the FOSS community. There are only a few things I know he said publicly:
1. Being a billionaire (remember thawte only sold for 490 million in 99 AFAIK and he paid his employees a lot)
If those things are true he is in no need to get any VC. Of course some of Canonical decisions seem awkward these things considered, but I honestly believe him when he says that his team of investment experts did really well the last 12 years. He did kinda predict the financial crisis in one of his blog posts.(Google is your friend)
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 24, 2011 3:11 UTC (Sun) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] If he wants to run Canonical as his hobby, pouring money into Ubuntu with no end in sight, it is his prerrogative to do so. If he makes more than that elsewhere is inmaterial (other than if he doesn't, Canonical is obviously toast). But if/when he tires of the hobby (which presumably started as a starry-eyed idea that would turn out profitable in a reasonable time period) or if his empire is taken over by somebody else with different views the question about business decisions Canonical has to make rationally becomes acutely relevant.
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 23, 2011 9:47 UTC (Sat) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link]
Err, you know ChromeOS is entirely based on Gentoo, yeah? ebuild, portage, all the Gentoo build tools, and indeed a forked copy of the Gentoo repository which serves as their base.
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 23, 2011 10:57 UTC (Sat) by kragilkragil2 (guest, #76172) [Link]
Jef is right, at first el Goog paid Canonical for engineering services and ChromeOS was based on Ubuntu. Later they canceled/ended the contract and switched to portage.
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 23, 2011 11:01 UTC (Sat) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link]
Sure, but the end result is that they developed ChromeOS in effect from scratch, and Canonical got paid for their engineering expertise to boot. So I'm not really sure how this is really relevant to the overall point.
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 23, 2011 11:44 UTC (Sat) by kragilkragil2 (guest, #76172) [Link]
No, Jef is right. It is hard to believe that they didn't learn a whole lot from the Ubuntu-based ChromeOS when they ported it/switched to Portage. That is a way easier than building it from scratch. They just didn't need all the Debian stuff, because they don't really need packages etc.
That is an insight you get once you have a working prototype/alpha.
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 24, 2011 12:49 UTC (Sun) by salimma (subscriber, #34460) [Link]
Too bad, otherwise the solution is obvious -- if Google relies on Ubuntu for a key product, they should just buy Canonical outright.
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 28, 2011 22:02 UTC (Thu) by JanC_ (guest, #34940) [Link]
Canonical is privately owned, no way to buy it without Shuttleworth wanting it...
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 28, 2011 22:01 UTC (Thu) by JanC_ (guest, #34940) [Link]
Even if ChromeOS is based on Gentoo, it still uses Upstart, and that project's code is owned by Canonical.
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 28, 2011 22:08 UTC (Thu) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link]
Google also employ Scott James Remnant, the founder and lead developer of Upstart.
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 24, 2011 20:22 UTC (Sun) by allison (subscriber, #56202) [Link]
There's no business in selling operating systems anymore. Have you seen the price tag on Mac OS X Lion? $29.99. $29.99?! You can't run a successful business on that. Apple has figured out the business models of service, support, and content. FLOSS figured out the first two a long time ago, and is diving right into the third (e.g. Android Marketplace) . If Microsoft hasn't figured this out yet, they'll be forced into it soon enough by market pressure. (Or, maybe they already have, they're making an awfully big deal out of their "cloud" services.) How much you want to bet Apple gives away the OS for free within 5 years? Works for the iPad, and they can't have missed noticing the screaming success there.
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 24, 2011 21:16 UTC (Sun) by Julie (✭ supporter ✭, #66693) [Link] Apple has figured out the business models of service, support, and content. ...and selling expensive (if elegant) hardware and devices with their operating system and software pre-installed on them as an inclusive, locked-down unit. Don't forget if you buy Lion it's either a) pre-installed on a new (Apple) machine or b) as an upgrade for a pre-existing Mac (with the latest version of Snow Leopard), not a standalone system you can install on any manufacturer's machine you choose. The license agreement for my Mac's OSX (which admittedly is rather old - they may have changed the terms but somehow I doubt it) explicitly prohibits me from doing this. They may eventually give the OS away as a free upgrade - but they are making too much from the locked-down model to change that.
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 26, 2011 16:45 UTC (Tue) by landley (guest, #6789) [Link]
Mark Shuttleworth's just doing capitalism 101.
Capitalism has two components: supplying demand and cornering the market. You can sell a great thing that everybody wants and if it's tap water or fresh air nobody will buy it. (Use it sure, pay you for it no.)
What you have to do to get rich is prevent customers from being able to get it anywhere _else_, so they have no choice but to pay you for it. Nobody pays a toll to cross a bridge without the river.
Another way to look at this is you can get paid in two ways: taxing and tipping. If you don't pay your taxes large men will take your stuff and drag you off to jail. But nobody has to put money in a tip jar, they do so because they want to, because they like what you did and want to encourage it (or because you managed to guilt them into it). Taxes fund governments, which get very big. Tipping funds waiters and webcartoonists and garage bands and the guy who writes Dwarf Fortress. It may provide some of the money for PBS, but it'll never make you a billionaire because by itself it doesn't scale that much.
Tipping happens because people _like_ you, ala "buy Linus a beer". Taxing happens because they have no choice, ala "sell your house to pay for the operation". Most purchases have elements of both, "I need food but I like this food". Sometimes it's even explicitly layered: you buy concert tickets because you like the band, but 3/4 of the money goes to the ticketmaster monopoly owned by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.
Mark Shuttleworth is trying to corner the market on projects he controls. He's wants something his competitors don't (can't) have. It's not as explicit as AT&T buying T-Mobile (and Verizon lining up to buy sprint, which leases its network to clear and such) to prevent customers from having any flat-rate wireless options and _forcing_ them into pay-per-byte overage schemes, but it's the same motivation. He's trying to make his company profitable by giving his customers less choice (I.E. fewer alternatives).
Cornering the market is half of capitalism. Patents are about cornering the market. Trusted computing is about cornering the market. DVD encryption (decss and region locking) is about cornering the market. And Mark Shuttleworth's copyright assignment campaign is about cornering the market so Ubuntu has an edge over its competitors.
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 27, 2011 19:57 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] Capitalism has two components: supplying demand and cornering the market. You can sell a great thing that everybody wants and if it's tap water or fresh air nobody will buy it.People buy bottled tap water at enormous markups all the time. It's just not *called* tap water.
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 27, 2011 20:22 UTC (Wed) by Julie (✭ supporter ✭, #66693) [Link] You can sell a great thing that everybody wants and if it's tap water ...hmm, we get a pretty regular bill from our water board...or fresh air nobody will buy it. *shush...*...*shhh...*...*Shhh...*...*SHHHH!!!*(D'you want to give the taxman ideas??) ;-)
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 24, 2011 23:15 UTC (Sun) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]
That'd be just like the old days again. :)
(Mac OS upgrades were all free until System 7.1 in 1992.)
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 25, 2011 11:45 UTC (Mon) by ingwa (subscriber, #71149) [Link]
With all due respect, how do you know anything about the Canonical finances? I would be very interested to find out more, and I'd be grateful if you could give me some pointers.
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 24, 2011 18:12 UTC (Sun) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link] Copyright assignment requires an explicit "written instrument of conveyance", on paper, with signature. This was an issue in the Novell vs SCO litigation about who owns the Unix copyrights, PJ covered it at length in Groklaw. The law _requires_ this, an oral contract is not sufficient here. WHO'S LAW !?!? Maybe your government requires it, but if (as seems likely) you are talking about the USC, well, that does not apply to Shuttleworth, or Ubuntu. I think my law would apply to Shuttleworth/Ubuntu, and I have to admit I don't know whether a paper signed assignment is necessary. I suspect not. I do think having something of the sort would be very sensible, but I strongly suspect that the courts would be quite happy with a cryptographically signed email. Cheers,
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 24, 2011 19:09 UTC (Sun) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] IANAL, but I believe you are incorrect. Any copyright assignment will have to be valid in both the assigner's and the assignee's jurisdiction. The assigner can't legally give the copyright away without a valid assignment, and the assignee can't receive it without one. So if I live in a jurisdiction like the USA that requires a written conveyance, then I need a written conveyance to validly assign it. It doesn't matter if Ubuntu's jurisdiction doesn't have such a stringent requirement; they can't legally receive my copyright unless I have legally given it away. If their jurisdiction has requirements that are different from mine, it may be difficult or impossible to come up with an assignment agreement that is legal in both jurisdictions. This is one more reason that copyright assignment requirements are troublesome.
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 25, 2011 12:17 UTC (Mon) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]
Bear in mind the gist of Berne is "no special treatment for locals". So I think you're wrong, but you do raise an interesting point that could cause legal mayhem :-)
As far as I am aware, it is the law of England and Wales that applies to Ubuntu. So, as far as we are concerned, American law is irrelevant. If you execute a transfer that complies with English Law, then Ubuntu is the copyright owner everywhere that jurisdiction applies.
If, however, that transfer does not comply with American law, Ubuntu may well have trouble claiming copyright in America :-)
Cheers,
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 25, 2011 12:40 UTC (Mon) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]
Really? Canonical's headquartered on the Isle of Man. The law of England and Wales doesn't seem like the most relevant concern, even if statute is mostly equivalent.
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 25, 2011 12:41 UTC (Mon) by ewan (subscriber, #5533) [Link]
IIRC Canonical is registered on the Isle Of Man. While I imagine the applicable copyright law is identical to English law, I'm not sure it's strictly accurate to say that English law applies.
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 25, 2011 21:24 UTC (Mon) by mgedmin (subscriber, #34497) [Link]
IANAL, but if you go to http://www.canonical.com/contributors and download the agreement PDF, you'll see section 6.1 mentions UK law explicitly:
6.1 This Agreement will be governed by and construed in
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 25, 2011 21:59 UTC (Mon) by Julie (✭ supporter ✭, #66693) [Link]
The Isle of Man is a funny one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isle_of_man
I always assumed that Mark was based there because of the comparatively generous tax laws compared to mainland UK (no Capital Gains Tax, for example) but there may be other benefits with regards to law or status that he/Canonical could take advantage of. Presumably (at least according to this Canonical document) this can't include copyright law.
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 25, 2011 22:10 UTC (Mon) by Julie (✭ supporter ✭, #66693) [Link] ...based there because of the comparatively generous tax laws compared to mainland UK... Oh, and because it's a beautiful island with its own weather system and a distinct absence of us mainland riffraff, of course... :-)
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 23, 2011 4:09 UTC (Sat) by branden (subscriber, #7029) [Link]
I'm glad Mr. Shuttleworth has reached that stage in his journey through affluence where he's seriously asking other people to spend a moment carefully considering what they can do for him.
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 23, 2011 5:16 UTC (Sat) by rodgerd (guest, #58896) [Link]
If patches are such a problem, Mark's free to not accept them, and hire enough developers to write all his own software.
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 24, 2011 19:31 UTC (Sun) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]
The most obvious problem with this position is the assumption that contributors will do nothing other than provide code and then vanish. In that case then yes, accepting patches will increase your maintenance overhead. But a well-managed free software project involves external contributors taking on some of your maintenance overhead themselves. If you want to achieve that goal then you need to set the barrier to contribution as low as possible. You need your contributors to feel as involved in the project as the people you employ to work on it. Requiring copyright assignment encourages people to provide their code and run - they're no longer going to feel as invested in the work they've done if they've been forced to sign over their rights.
It's short sighted thinking, and if it applied to Ubuntu as a whole then I don't think the Ubuntu community would be anything like as vibrant as it is. Mark needs to look at the Ubuntu community's relatively high level of contribution from external developers and compare that to the tiny number of external contributions to bzr, Unity or Launchpad. I don't think the difference is coincidental.
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 25, 2011 16:05 UTC (Mon) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
>The most obvious problem with this position is the assumption that contributors will do nothing other than provide code and then vanish
More than that, it assumes that 'code contributions' and 'maintenance' are orthogonal issues.
In reality a significant minority - possibly even a majority - of small one-off contributions *are* *maintenance*. Most of the people reading this have probably sent in small patches to some piece of software or another, fixing a crash that happens in a specific case, or some bug that eventually gets too annoying to ignore.
Having to fill in and post some pieces of paper to another country in order to do that is crazy talk.
The cost of copyleft Posted Jul 25, 2011 22:27 UTC (Mon) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link]
While I am a fan of copyleft, the fact is that using simpler free software licenses obliviates the need for copyright assignments. That being the case, most of the Mark's arguments fly right out the window. All the costs that he is trying to justify the need for assignment with, are not valid if they do not directly derive from the cost of maintaining copyleft software. Throwing trademark issues in the mix, comparing to physical world, ... etc. is just an attempt to obfuscate and confuse the issue to his advantage.
Copyleft does have a cost, but those are the only relevant costs here. If he doesn't like the cost, why choose a copyleft license?
The cost of copyleft Posted Jul 31, 2011 3:20 UTC (Sun) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]
It may very well be that copyleft is more hindrance than help. Traditionally, I've been a copyleft fan. But increasingly, I'm genuinely listening to the permissive licensing supporters. Copyleft results in such a tangled web. It scares people away. Move so far away from the GPL church as even subscribing to Python-related mailing lists, and the fear of GPL infection is readily apparent. And while there is sometimes a degree of misunderstanding, the fears are very much not completely unfounded.
Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership Posted Jul 26, 2011 8:52 UTC (Tue) by etienne (subscriber, #25256) [Link]
So when someone at Canonical make a patch to a subsystem, do they sign the upstream copyright assignment agreement - or do they keep the patch for Ubuntu only?
Upstream copyright assignment; Ubuntu distribution vs. Canonical upstream Posted Jul 26, 2011 14:03 UTC (Tue) by sladen (subscriber, #27402) [Link] To quote from Mark Shuttleworth's statements in the linked article:Note that the Canonical CLA applies to (upstream) projects managed by Canonical. The Ubuntu and Debian distributions themselves do not have contributor licence agreementsalthough one would be expected to adhere to the ideals of the Ubuntu Code of Conduct and the Debian Social Contract, respectively.
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