Intel and XMir [LWN.net]

Intel and XMir

Posted Sep 13, 2013 0:18 UTC (Fri) by daniels (subscriber, #16193)
In reply to: Intel and XMir by kiko
Parent article: Intel and XMir

The 'but it's all open source' thing is a bit of a red herring, when Mir is developed under a CLA which allows Canonical — and only Canonical — to relicense code under proprietary terms for its own profit, to the exclusion of all others, including any external contributors.

(Log in to post comments)

Intel and XMir

Posted Sep 26, 2013 15:52 UTC (Thu) by kiko (subscriber, #69905) [Link]

I don't think that's a fair comment; what we are discussing here is open source, non-CLA'd code in the open source Intel driver -- it's definitely odd to see for political reasons a patch like that backed out, and it's weird that you don't think the same.

Any copyright owner has the right to selfishly relicense code they wrote; the CLA is definitely controversial in its expansiveness (and overall myself I don't like it) but it's not like we are doing something that unusual. Companies with different business models care about different types of freedom and openness. Canonical gives away its main product, with updates, at no cost to the end-user. Redhat and SUSE charge end-users for theirs.

But let me put this controversy a different way, using a contrived analogy (that is contrived only because Intel doesn't license its GPU IP, but I feel is still useful). Let's say there was code in this GPU driver that would only be useful on ARM-based systems -- say, to work with the ARM memory controller and memory architecture. Would it be reasonable for an Intel maintainer to back out patches on the basis that ARM isn't interesting to them?