Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
I had the opportunity to sit down with Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu
and Canonical, for an wide-ranging, hour-long conversation
while at Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) in Budapest. In his opening talk, Shuttleworth said that he wanted to "make the case
"
for contributor agreements, which is something he had not been successful
in doing previously. In order to do that, he outlined a rather different
vision than he has described before of how to increase Linux and free
software adoption, particularly on
the desktop, in order to reach his goal of 200 million Ubuntu users in the
next four years. While some readers may not agree with various parts of
that vision, it is
definitely worth understanding Shuttleworth's thinking here.
Company participation in free software
In Shuttleworth's view, the participation of companies is vital to bringing the Linux desktop to
the next level, and there is no real path for purely software companies to
move from producing proprietary software toward making free software.
There is a large "spike-filled canyon
" between the proprietary
and the free license
world. Companies that do not even try to move in a "more free" direction
are largely ignored by the community, while those which start to take some
tentative steps in that direction tend to be harassed,
"barbed
", and "belittled
". That means that
companies have to leap that canyon all in one go or face the wrath of the
"ideologues
" in the community. It sets up a "perverse
situation where companies who are trying to engage get the worst
experience
", he said.
The community tends to distrust the motives of companies and even fear
them, but it is a "childish fear
", he said. If we make
decisions based on that fear, they are likely to be bad ones. Like
individuals, companies have varied motives some of which align with the
interests of the community and some of which don't. Using examples like
Debian finding the GNU Free Documentation License to be non-free, while
Debian is not a free distribution under the FSF's guidelines, he noted that
the community can't even define what a "fully free" organization looks
like. Those kinds of disagreements make it such that we are "only
condemning ourselves to a lifetime of argument
". In addition, because it is so unclear, "professional software
companies
" aren't likely to run the gauntlet of community
unhappiness to start down the path that we as a community should want them
to.
Essentially, Shuttleworth believes that it is this anti-corporate,
free-license-only agenda that is holding free software back. For some,
"the idea of freedom is more important than the reality
", and
those people may "die happy
" knowing that their ideal was
never breached, but that isn't what's best for free software, its
adoption, and expansion. The "ideologues are costing free software
the chance
" to get more corporate participation. What's needed is a
"more mature
understanding of how free software can actually grow
", he said.
Existing company participation
There are, of course, companies that do contribute to free software, but
those companies "do something orthogonal
" to software
development, he said. He pointed to Intel as a hardware vendor that wants
to sell more chips, and Google, which provides services, as examples of
these kinds of participants. There are also the distribution companies,
Red Hat, SUSE, Canonical, and others, but they have little interest in
seeing free software projects become empowered (by which he means able to
generate revenue streams of their own), he said, because that means
that anyone looking for support or "assurances about the
software
" can only get it through the distribution companies.
Though some at Canonical disagree with the approach—because it will
reduce the company's revenues—Shuttleworth is taking a stand in favor
of contributor
agreements to try to empower the components that make up distributions. By
doing that, "it will weaken Canonical
", but will strengthen
the ecosystem. There needs to be more investment into the components, he
said, which requires that those components have more power, some of
which could come from the projects owning the copyright of the code.
Whether those projects are owned by Canonical, some other company, or by a
project foundation, owning the code empowers the components.
The other main reason that Shuttleworth is "taking a strong public
view
" about contributor agreements is to provide some cover for
those who might want to use them. He has "thick skin
" and
would like to move the free software ecosystem to getting more
"companies that are actually interested in software
"
involved. So far, he has "seen no proposals from the
ideologues
" on how to do that.
Companies may be more willing to open up their code and participate if they
know they can also offer the code under different terms. That requires
that, at least some of the time, contributors be willing to give their patches to
the project. Those who are unwilling to do so are just loaning their
patches to the project, and "loaning a patch is very uncool
".
The "fundamentalists
" who are unwilling to contribute their
code under a copyright assignment (while retaining broad rights to the code in question) are simply
not being generous, he said.
The state of free software today
The goal should be to "attract the maximum possible participation to
projects that have a free element
", he said. He is "not arguing for
proprietary software
", but he is tired of seeing "80%
done
" software. In addition, the free software desktop applications
are generally far behind their proprietary counterparts in terms of
functionality and usability. He would like to "partner with companies that
get things done
", specifically pointing to Mozilla as an
organization that qualifies.
The fear that our code will be taken proprietary is holding us back,
Shuttleworth said. In the meantime, we have many projects where the job is
only 80% done, and there is no documentation. A lot of those projects
eventually end up in the hands of new hackers who take over the project and
want to
change everything, which results in a different unfinished application or
framework.
Involving software companies will not be without its own set of problems,
as those companies will still do "other things that we don't
like
", but there is a need for professional software companies to help
get free software over the hump.
The "lone hacker
" style of development is great as far as it
goes, but there are lots of other pieces that need to come together. He
pointed to the differences between Qt and GTK as one example. GTK is a
"hacker toolkit
", whereas Qt is owned by a company that does
documentation, QA, and other tasks needed to turn it into a "professional
toolkit
". Corporate ownership of the code will sometimes lead to
abuse, like "Oracle messing around with Java
", but free
software needs to "use
" companies in a kind of
"jujitsu
" that leverages the use of the companies' code in
ways that are beneficial to the ecosystem.
He said that some of the biggest free software success stories come
from companies being involved with the code. MySQL and PostgreSQL are
"two great free
software databases
", which have companies behind their
development or providing support. CUPS is a great
printing subsystem at least partly because it is owned and maintained by
Apple. Android is another example of an open source success; it has Google
maintaining strict control over the codebase.
Shuttleworth has a fairly serious disagreement with how the
OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice split came about. He said that Sun made a $100
million "gift
" to the community when it opened up the
OpenOffice code. But
a "radical faction
" made the lives of the OpenOffice
developers "hell
" by refusing to contribute code under the Sun
agreement. That eventually led to the split, but furthermore led Oracle to
finally decide to stop OpenOffice development and lay off 100 employees.
He contends that the pace of development for LibreOffice is not keeping up
with what OpenOffice was able to achieve and wonders if OpenOffice would
have been better off if the "factionalists
" hadn't won.
There is a "pathological lack of understanding
" among some
parts of the community about what companies bring to the table, he said.
People fear and mistrust the companies on one hand, while asking
"where can I get a job in free software?
" on the
other. Companies bring jobs, he said. There is a lot of "ideological
claptrap
" that permeates the community and, while it is reasonable
to be cautious about the motives of companies, avoiding them entirely is
not rational.
Project Harmony
The Canonical contributor
agreement is "mediocre at best
", but does have "some
elements which are quite generous
", he said. It gives a wide license
back for code that is contributed so the code can be released under any
license the author chooses. In addition, Canonical will make at least one
release of the project using the patch under the license that governs
the project, he said. That guarantee does not seem to appear in the actual
agreement
[PDF], however.
These kinds of contributor agreements are going to continue to exist, he
said, and believing otherwise "denies the reality of the world we
live in
". The problem is that there are so many different
agreements that are "all amateur in one form or another
", so
there is a need to "distill the number of combinations and
permutations
" of those agreements into a consistent set. That is
the role of Project Harmony, he said.
The project brought together various groups, companies, organizations, and
individuals with different ideas about contributor agreements, including
some who are "bitterly opposed
" to copyright assignment. The
project has produced draft 1.0
agreements that have "wide recognition
" that they
represent the set of options that various projects want.
The agreements will help the community move away from "ad hoc
"
agreements to a standard set, which is "akin to Creative
Commons
", he said. The idea is that it will become a familiar
process for developers so they don't have to figure out a different
agreement for each project they contribute to. Down the road, Shuttleworth
sees the project working on a 2.0 version of the agreements which would
cover more jurisdictions, and address any problems that arise.
Shuttleworth's vision
In the hour that we spoke, Shuttleworth was clearly passionate about free software, while being rather frustrated with the state of free software applications today. He has a vision for the future of free software that is very different from the current approach. One can certainly disagree with that vision, but it is one that he has carefully thought out and believes in. One could also argue that huge progress has been made with free software over the last two or three decades—and Shuttleworth agrees—but will our current approach take things to the "next level"? Or is some kind of different approach required?
As far as contributor agreements go, it seems a bit late to be making the case for them at this point—something that Shuttleworth acknowledged in his talk at the UDS opening. Opposition to the agreements, at least those requiring copyright assignment, is fairly high, and opponents have likely dug in their heels. While he bemoans ideology regarding contributor agreements, there are procedural hurdles that make them unpopular as well; few want to run legal agreements by their (or their company's) lawyers.
The biggest question, though, seems to be whether a more agreement-friendly
community would lead to more participation by companies. If the goal is to
get free software on some rather large number of desktops in a few short
years—a goal that may not be shared by all—it would certainly
seem that something needs to change. Whether that means including more
companies who may also be pursuing proprietary goals with the same code is
unclear, but it is
clear that Shuttleworth, at least, is going to try to make that happen.
| Index entries for this article | |
|---|---|
| Conference | Ubuntu Developer Summit/2011 |
Posted May 17, 2011 16:12 UTC (Tue)
by josh (subscriber, #17465)
[Link] (8 responses)
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.
Posted May 17, 2011 16:43 UTC (Tue)
by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239)
[Link] (4 responses)
Posted May 19, 2011 9:03 UTC (Thu)
by dneary (guest, #55185)
[Link] (3 responses)
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.
Posted May 19, 2011 15:41 UTC (Thu)
by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106)
[Link] (1 responses)
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"?
Posted May 19, 2011 15:46 UTC (Thu)
by dneary (guest, #55185)
[Link]
:-) It was a patent encumbered patch.
Dave.
Posted May 23, 2011 7:21 UTC (Mon)
by fabsh (guest, #61595)
[Link]
Posted May 17, 2011 16:59 UTC (Tue)
by wlach (subscriber, #23397)
[Link] (2 responses)
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.
Posted May 17, 2011 20:14 UTC (Tue)
by AlexHudson (guest, #41828)
[Link] (1 responses)
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".
Posted May 18, 2011 9:39 UTC (Wed)
by misc (subscriber, #73730)
[Link]
Posted May 17, 2011 16:35 UTC (Tue)
by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
[Link] (23 responses)
I want to give Mark Shuttleworth as much benefit of the doubt as I can muster and I'm hoping for his sake that breadcrumbs of quoted phrases make more sense when viewed in the original context instead of how they are presented here by the LWN author.
I'm not saying that to disparage Jake's editorial eye, but I'm sincerely hoping that in the actual conversation Mark makes more sense and shows a more nuanced and mature understanding of the issues than how his views are presented herein. There's a lot of emotional leakage showing in the chosen quoted phrases, and not much reasoned or rational thinking. I'd hoping the rest of the conversation has a little more meat to chew on and a lot less sensational jaw dropping moments.
-jef
Posted May 17, 2011 17:07 UTC (Tue)
by jake (editor, #205)
[Link] (4 responses)
No, I'm afraid not. No audio was recorded, we just chatted and I took notes, while trying to understand Mark's ideas as best I could.
> There's a lot of emotional leakage showing in the chosen quoted
If that's true, then I failed to convey the conversation well. Mark has certainly done a lot of thinking about this stuff, and presented it in a rational way. It was, though, an off-the-cuff discussion, not some prepared remarks, which leads to some disjointedness (as does me madly trying to take notes while listening).
jake
Posted May 17, 2011 17:19 UTC (Tue)
by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
[Link] (1 responses)
I would not consider the quoted material as a best-foot-forward approach towards a constructive discussion. But speech like that, which casts those with a different pov as "fundamentalists" right out of the gate is a good open salvo in a public relations war. I'm not sure that is actually what Shuttleworth wants... a war of words. That would seem to be counter to his goals. And it's not what I took away from his very sincerely sounding contrite apology in the UDS keynote video for not leading the discussion on these issues prior to this point.
If you have a followup private discussion with him, please encourage him to make an on the record statement in full in his own words instead of continuing to have private discussions with intermediaries which run the risk of misrepresenting what he actually wants to achieve.
If I'm fundamentalist about anything, its my desire to have a public on the record discussion about these issues, where everyone can be held personally accountable for what they choose to say in the discussion.
-jef
Posted May 17, 2011 19:51 UTC (Tue)
by ejr (subscriber, #51652)
[Link]
Posted May 18, 2011 8:29 UTC (Wed)
by k3ninho (subscriber, #50375)
[Link]
K3n.
Posted May 19, 2011 8:43 UTC (Thu)
by jschrod (subscriber, #1646)
[Link]
Posted May 17, 2011 18:17 UTC (Tue)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link] (17 responses)
the fact that he thinks that contributor agreements will '"..weaken Canonical", but will strengthen the ecosystem. ' is defiantly not something that is understandable from the quotes.
Posted May 17, 2011 18:28 UTC (Tue)
by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
[Link] (1 responses)
I expect a certain amount of sensationalism in any laypress article. They do have a job to do which is not strictly to report the boring bits. I don't think this is unduly sensationalist, but its also not a constructive dialog on the merits. Its _interesting_ but not necessarily _constructive_.
This is why Shuttleworth really needs to stop engaging with the press...stop making soundbites..and actually engage in a discussion on the merits with people who respectfully disagree with his position and actually talk through things and make the case for and against. It doesn't have to be a free for all, but an on the record thoughtful publicly archived full conversation is needed.
-jef
Posted May 17, 2011 18:55 UTC (Tue)
by andrel (guest, #5166)
[Link]
Posted May 17, 2011 19:29 UTC (Tue)
by corbet (editor, #1)
[Link] (14 responses)
Mark says he wants to "empower" projects; by that, I believe, he means empowering a project's (single) owner to take it proprietary if need be. An empowered project can create its own revenue stream, in the process taking revenue from the distributors who are otherwise the only ones in a position to support the code. So, by "empowering" projects in this way, he hopes to strengthen the ecosystem (creating more high-quality applications), but, since such empowerment may take revenue from Canonical, it may weaken his company.
Posted May 17, 2011 19:42 UTC (Tue)
by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
[Link] (13 responses)
I call BS.
-jef
Posted May 17, 2011 21:33 UTC (Tue)
by dgm (subscriber, #49227)
[Link] (12 responses)
Posted May 17, 2011 21:44 UTC (Tue)
by AlexHudson (guest, #41828)
[Link] (1 responses)
If you care about sustainable business models, giving someone else the control over your revenue stream is not a sure-fire recipe for success.
Posted May 18, 2011 7:22 UTC (Wed)
by ingwa (guest, #71149)
[Link]
If the banshee developers want to create a revenue stream from their free software project, it's not at all a given right that they can demand help with this from the distribution.
When it comes to users, it's the shared interest of the developers and the distro that as many users as possible get access to the application. But when it comes to revenue stream, they suddenly become competitors. Or rather: they become different steps in a standard sales channel: the vendor and the distributor. It's only fair that they share the revenue.
This said, it's entirely possible that the best strategy in the long run is to build your own distribution channel and get 100% of the revenue. After all, you should own your own customers, right? But then the devs or (more likely) their fanboys shouldn't complain that the distributor doesn't give them a channel for revenue generation for free.
Posted May 17, 2011 22:32 UTC (Tue)
by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
[Link] (9 responses)
I'm not saying Corbet's interpretation of what Mark said really is what Mark intended or not. Without the original conversation I can't make the judgement for myself. Corbet did admit this was hard for the LWN team to wrap their head around what Mark said here and I'm more than willing to give them the benefit of the doubt as I'm the _only_ professional Mark Shuttleworth mind reader. I have business cards and everything...very classy..very professional..I'm available for birthday and retirement parties.
I'm saying,that correct or not, that particular interpretation doesn't make any sense in the context of what happened with Banshee. And if that is what Mark really meant to say, Mark needs to take a second run at explaining his point using the Banshee situation as an illustrative example of how Canonical is willing to take a financial loss in order to empower application developers and the ecosystem to build viable revenue streams to take application development to the next level. Because from where I sit, it sure looks like Canonical actions are out of step with the intent expressed here.
-jef
Posted May 17, 2011 22:45 UTC (Tue)
by jake (editor, #205)
[Link] (8 responses)
I think what Jon meant was that I didn't describe what Mark said very well. I/We thought that a revision of that particular spot in the article fixed the problem, but evidently it did not. I agree that Jon's characterization of what Mark said is my understanding as well, which should come as no surprise because I am the one who explained what was meant during the review process.
I do think that Mark would put a much different spin on the Banshee situation than you are (of course). He would, I think, argue that he is trying to empower Banshee with a larger revenue stream by bringing the application into Ubuntu, which will, at least in his mind, bring many more users (and much more revenue) to the project. You can agree or disagree with that, but it is in keeping with what he said in our conversation, I believe.
jake
Posted May 17, 2011 22:58 UTC (Tue)
by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
[Link] (7 responses)
Clearly Banshee developers felt empowered before Canonical as a distributor decided they deserved a cut for providing a platform. Nothing Canonical did "empowered" Banshee devs to build that revenue stream.
And since we are talking numbers... does Canonical have a public fee schedule for application developers who want to build revenue streams that Canonical will be taking a reasonable cut of in the future as platform provider?
We've seen Google just announce at GoogleIO a flat 5% commission on revenue generating apps which make use of their html5 based platform on ChromeOS (AngryBirds being the showpiece for that). And we've also seen some information concerning Apple "empowerment" of application developer revenue models (poor poor CoverFlow) But I really haven't seen anything concrete from Canonical about what application developers can expect. Or does Canonical anticipate that so few developers are going to be interested in their platform that they can just handle revenue sharing on a case by case basis.
-jef
Posted May 25, 2011 5:00 UTC (Wed)
by loftsy (guest, #75160)
[Link] (6 responses)
Posted May 26, 2011 8:02 UTC (Thu)
by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
[Link] (4 responses)
I don't see how such an agreement would help the Banshee developers; they choose to release their code under GPL terms, and Canonical/Ubuntu are complying with those terms. If one entity held all the copyrights on Banshee, I still don't see how they could use that leverage to affect Canonical's behaviour.
Copyright-wise, what Canonical is doing is legal. Its the morality of their actions that's in dispute; legal ownership of the copyright is a non-sequitur.
Posted May 26, 2011 16:39 UTC (Thu)
by loftsy (guest, #75160)
[Link] (3 responses)
Banshee could have written the Amazon plugin under a more restrictive license which prevented Ubuntu from changing the billing code. Then used their control of the Banshee source-code to allow the usage of the proprietary plugin.
Posted May 26, 2011 16:59 UTC (Thu)
by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted May 26, 2011 17:24 UTC (Thu)
by loftsy (guest, #75160)
[Link]
Still - it doesn't change the fact that retaining copyright provides you with options. In this case it would have to come down to relicensing.
Posted May 26, 2011 17:34 UTC (Thu)
by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
[Link]
Effectively, what you're saying is that if the Banshee developers had chosen to take their code proprietary, they wouldn't have trouble with Canonical taking advantage of the benefits of Free Software.
While that's certainly true, that's not a benefit to Free Software, and if that's the sort of thing that people are coming up with that justifies copyright assignment, then I'm going to remain sceptical of Mark's motivations.
Posted May 26, 2011 8:04 UTC (Thu)
by renox (guest, #23785)
[Link]
Only if they're willing to threaten to go from a free license to a proprietary license only otherwise their position wouldn't be much stronger.
If a project do this, it wouldn't be considered anymore as a free software project I think..
Posted May 17, 2011 16:49 UTC (Tue)
by nettings (subscriber, #429)
[Link] (23 responses)
mark's position is quite insightful, but i don't see him refute this issue, which is at the core of things as i see it.
Posted May 17, 2011 17:42 UTC (Tue)
by dgm (subscriber, #49227)
[Link] (4 responses)
Posted May 18, 2011 19:45 UTC (Wed)
by rahvin (guest, #16953)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted May 26, 2011 12:33 UTC (Thu)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link] (2 responses)
And kids who do well at games are rarely the sharpest knives in the block.
Cheers,
Posted May 27, 2011 6:42 UTC (Fri)
by AdamW (subscriber, #48457)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted May 29, 2011 16:37 UTC (Sun)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link]
Just because A implies B (successful businessman implies good at sports when kid) doesn't mean B implies A (good at sports implies good businessman).
Most new businesses go bust. It seems the skills that give a business the best chance are also those that tend to lead success on the sports field. But it's quite likely that successful businesses are lead/run by people who have the ability to do well (but not excel) at sport. If they excel they stay in sports. If they don't, when they go into business they are more likely to excel there than the general populace as a whole.
Cheers,
Posted May 17, 2011 18:23 UTC (Tue)
by kleptog (subscriber, #1183)
[Link] (17 responses)
I'm trying to understand what you actually lose by signing a contributor agreement. Actual, practical issues, not ideological ones.
Posted May 17, 2011 18:53 UTC (Tue)
by andrel (guest, #5166)
[Link] (15 responses)
Posted May 17, 2011 20:25 UTC (Tue)
by kleptog (subscriber, #1183)
[Link] (14 responses)
But ISTM the issue is more bad agreements than that all such agreements are bad. Can't someone come up with a few good examples that can be used as models.
That said, what does a good contributor agreement give you (or anybody) that requiring all contributions to be BSD licensed doesn't.
Posted May 17, 2011 20:40 UTC (Tue)
by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
[Link] (11 responses)
When codebases are BSD license, copyright assignment doesn't create any special relicensing privileges for any contributor or contributing entity. When its BSD code, anyone can take the code a make a proprietary fork and compete with everyone else for the same market.
Mark Shuttleworth continues to over simplify the issues. The issue is not copyright assignment. The issue is the interaction of copyright assignment with copyright licensing choices in a way that deliberatively creates an unfair business advantage for one contributor over all others. He wants to paint opponents as a fundamentally oppose to assignment because he needs to point opponents as unreasonable in order for his point of view to seem relatively more reasonable. This is naked rhetorical manipulation of the discussion. At this point, he should know better. It's time to stop manipulate perception and to start having a conversation on the merits.
-jef
Posted May 17, 2011 21:54 UTC (Tue)
by kleptog (subscriber, #1183)
[Link] (10 responses)
There are contributor agreements that don't do copyright assignment, Google's for example. They just want a statement that you own the code and won't assert any patents.
But there's your statement: "... in a way that deliberatively creates an unfair business advantage for one contributor over all others". Besides that being the whole point of copyright, I have a hard time seeing this as automatically unreasonable. If some company is investing in a project, why shouldn't they get some benefits? As long as all contributions are available in an open source release, you still get to fork if you really want to. What's the catch I'm missing?
Posted May 17, 2011 22:16 UTC (Tue)
by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
[Link] (9 responses)
However if your employer happens to be in the business of competing with that company and a proprietary version of the codebase you want to contribute to helps that other company more effectively compete with your employer... make really really sure your employer is okay with your contributing your expertise in helping out a competitor get a specialized advantage that your employer can't equally benefit from.
Or imagine a situation where the original copyright owning company completely and utterly fails to execute on its business plan. Just utterly drops the ball because of gross incompetence at the management level after like a decade of chewing through venture capital. You and a few other independent contributors who have the technical skills to maintain the project want to create a new managing entity with better management and try your hand at the proprietary relicensing business because you want to take a shot and doing the business thing better. If the code is GPL with copyright assignment, You'll have to _buy_ _back_ the copyrights you originally _gave_ _away_ to the first corporate entity. If the code is BSD (without without assignment) you can just go for it and build the better business.
-jef
Posted May 18, 2011 0:43 UTC (Wed)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link] (8 responses)
if there is a company doing major development and you don't do copyright assignment and they go under and you want to try your had at proprietary licensing, you have to buy all the copyrights that you don't own. It may be harder to buy copyrights from many different people than to buy them all from one entity (even if it includes things that you wrote to begin with)
there is a fundamental difference in view between the people who assume that assignment (even if joint) is valid and those who do not
those who see it as valid see the organization that manages the copyrights as creating the vast majority of the code, with the other contributers being , if not minor, at least significantly less significant.
those who see it as invalid see the contribution from the outside as being worth at least as much as that generated by the organization.
different projects will have different ratios, but at least initially, almost every project where their is a team of people paid to work on it full time, that team will out-produce the outsiders. Over time the outsiders may become a much larger portion of the development, but if the development really is very lopsided, is it really so unfair?
one thing that assignment avoids is any arguments over if a particular patch is significant enough to warrent copyright on it's own.
Posted May 18, 2011 1:00 UTC (Wed)
by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
[Link] (7 responses)
It's only when you mix copyleft licensing which strongly implies a co-development model with corporate copyright assignment where things get problematic and inequity arises between contributors. In this case the specific wording of the contributor agreement can matter a lot in terms of weighing the trade-offs...especially if you ever ever want to use the code you are contributing in another project or in another context.
-jef
Posted May 18, 2011 1:14 UTC (Wed)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link] (6 responses)
but is such an extreme contract even common? much less the norm?
anything that I've seen that was an actual copyright assignment also included a license back to the author to use the code for any purpose or any context.
Posted May 18, 2011 2:00 UTC (Wed)
by foom (subscriber, #14868)
[Link] (5 responses)
Posted May 18, 2011 2:07 UTC (Wed)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link] (4 responses)
that's a very good reason for pushing for either joint copyright assignment, or to explicitly give the project the right to dual license the code, or some other mechanism that can give the organization the rights that it is really looking for.
Posted May 18, 2011 3:13 UTC (Wed)
by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
[Link] (3 responses)
-jef
Posted May 18, 2011 3:34 UTC (Wed)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link] (2 responses)
isn't that why Cannonical pushed for project harmony? It makes sense to me that while they see a problem with the current agreement, rather than trying to tweak the current agreement they instead try and work out a better document through wider discussion and only after that change their version.
it takes time to figure out how to fix things, but there is plenty of evidence that they are working on this area.
Posted May 18, 2011 4:16 UTC (Wed)
by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
[Link] (1 responses)
As far as I'm concerning Harmony under Chatham House rules was lost time and effort. Harmony is rebooting now with a public mailinglist. We'll see if Mark shows up on that publicly archived list and makes the case for assignment in his renewed effort to show leadership in this area. The continued lack of public discourse from him continues to be disturbing.
-jef
Posted May 25, 2011 10:26 UTC (Wed)
by markshuttle (guest, #22379)
[Link]
Harmony is not "rebooting", it's got a draft which is appropriate for discussion.
FTR, Jake's article fairly represents my commentary. Under the circumstances, with me speaking fast and him taking notes, it's a very reasonable rendition.
Posted May 17, 2011 20:51 UTC (Tue)
by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239)
[Link]
Posted May 18, 2011 8:05 UTC (Wed)
by mjthayer (guest, #39183)
[Link]
Perhaps you don't want anyone to be able to use your code, but you do want it to get into this one commercial product. VirtualBox lets you choose between MIT licencing and a contributor agreement.
Posted May 17, 2011 20:05 UTC (Tue)
by airlied (subscriber, #9104)
[Link]
You can't even recontribute your code to another project as you no longer own it.
Posted May 17, 2011 17:26 UTC (Tue)
by nye (subscriber, #51576)
[Link] (10 responses)
Mark Shuttleworth finally decides that being generally obnoxious is insufficiently fun, and switches to outright trolling.
What an unpleasant man.
Posted May 17, 2011 17:42 UTC (Tue)
by apolinsky (subscriber, #19556)
[Link] (3 responses)
Alan
Posted May 17, 2011 17:54 UTC (Tue)
by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted May 18, 2011 8:09 UTC (Wed)
by mjthayer (guest, #39183)
[Link]
Questions of obnoxiousness aside, copyright assignment probably does discourage people from making "significant" contributions to projects.
Posted May 17, 2011 18:00 UTC (Tue)
by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
[Link]
A disagreement with Shuttleworth over this issue is not an attack on Ubuntu or the Ubuntu community. A refusal to sign Canonical's contributor disagreement is not a disavowal of the Ubuntu CoC or the Ubuntu community ethos.
Don't let your enthusiasm for Ubuntu and for the Ubuntu community model cloud your judgment about the issues here concerning the balance between the interests of for-profit entities and the interests of the larger ecosystem with regard to the importance of a shared commons of peer co-development. These are really important issues for the overall ecosystem that go well beyond simple distribution tribalism.
-jef
Posted May 17, 2011 17:57 UTC (Tue)
by ingwa (guest, #71149)
[Link] (5 responses)
And free software projects have a notorious habit of not going the final km.
Posted May 17, 2011 18:43 UTC (Tue)
by tdwebste (guest, #18154)
[Link]
This may not a bad thing for shared development. Companies who sell hardware components or developer services benefit from the expanded application market created for their devices and services by the shared development effort enforced by GPL licenses.
Unfortunately Companies who create applications compete with every other application developer often without much customer loyalty. To gain customer loyalty these Companies need to be able to provide something other competing cannot. BSD and dual-licenses to the rescue. These licenses allow Companies to benefit from the development effort of others without sharing the hard bits.
BSD and dual-licenses result in fragmentation and wasted effort, because the hard bits are not shared. Solutions from Companies with the largest market share winning out. Not necessarily the best solutions.
GPL fragmentation is actually a good thing because others can observe and experiment with the alternate solutions to the hard bits, with finally the best solutions winning out.
-------
Posted May 17, 2011 21:50 UTC (Tue)
by dgm (subscriber, #49227)
[Link] (3 responses)
Maybe the amount of work you mention is the very reason why some projects don't walk that extra Km. It's a very uphill one.
Posted May 18, 2011 7:36 UTC (Wed)
by ingwa (guest, #71149)
[Link] (2 responses)
I'm pretty sure that this is the reason. But some projects actually do, even if there are no company behind it, even if it's rare. Krita[1], to take an example in my neigborhood, is handled very professionally. But you need to involve other skills than just software development, and that's also not something that many free software projects do.
Posted May 18, 2011 8:11 UTC (Wed)
by mjthayer (guest, #39183)
[Link]
Perhaps a strong focus on making it easy for others to contribute would help too. But that is also boring once your software does what you want it to.
Posted May 22, 2011 0:30 UTC (Sun)
by pflugstad (subscriber, #224)
[Link]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month#Proje...
This is covered in the first 5 pages of the book, which can usually be read online from Amazon. And it jives very well with every software project I've been involved in over ~20 years.
Anyone who does software as a profession needs to have read this book. And if your manager has not - find a new manager.
Posted May 17, 2011 18:10 UTC (Tue)
by dkg (subscriber, #55359)
[Link] (5 responses)
Remind me again why these examples are supposed to convince me of the merits of copyright assignment?
Posted May 18, 2011 6:15 UTC (Wed)
by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted May 18, 2011 15:02 UTC (Wed)
by dkg (subscriber, #55359)
[Link] (2 responses)
At this point, i'd rather rely on the Postgres community (though i confess i like the Postgres RDBMS itself better than i like the MySQL RDBMS, so my technical inclinations may also be coloring my perceptions).
Posted May 19, 2011 17:48 UTC (Thu)
by sorpigal (guest, #36106)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted May 19, 2011 18:00 UTC (Thu)
by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
[Link]
Posted May 26, 2011 8:11 UTC (Thu)
by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
[Link]
On a similar level, how about OpenSolaris (which required assignment) versus Linux? Both were mature kernels - if copyright assignment makes things better, why didn't Shuttleworth choose to switch to OpenSolaris instead of Linux?
My trouble with his analogy is exactly the same as yours - I see that long term, projects with contributor agreements go proprietary. Projects without stay free. If I'm contributing to proprietary software, I expect to be paid hard cash for my code. If I'm contributing to free software, I'm happy to be paid in kind.
Posted May 17, 2011 18:12 UTC (Tue)
by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted May 17, 2011 18:20 UTC (Tue)
by jzb (editor, #7867)
[Link]
Posted May 17, 2011 21:51 UTC (Tue)
by Trelane (subscriber, #56877)
[Link]
And obscenely difficult patch acceptance requirements iirc.
mmeeks has a number of very informative articles on the subject from the last year or two (http://people.gnome.org/~michael/)
Posted May 27, 2011 6:49 UTC (Fri)
by AdamW (subscriber, #48457)
[Link]
Posted May 17, 2011 18:13 UTC (Tue)
by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
[Link] (60 responses)
Quick follow up. Were you sponsored by Canonical to attend UDS? Or did you fly out there on LWN's dime?
-jef
Posted May 17, 2011 18:27 UTC (Tue)
by jake (editor, #205)
[Link] (59 responses)
As with most international travel (and domestic for that matter), LWN doesn't have the budget to send people to all of the different events that we cover. So we look for sponsorships and in this case Canonical did cover airfare and hotel.
jake
Posted May 17, 2011 18:38 UTC (Tue)
by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
[Link] (58 responses)
Again not to say that you are overly bias, if anything I think you punched Shuttleworth in the mouth a little with your choice of quotes. And because the article isn't overtly biased in his favor even though you were sponsored, it gives me some leeway in asking you about bias in the industry in a more general way with the hope that you'll give the question full consideration. Is it ethical for technical laypress to withhold travel sponsorship information from readership?
And it gives me the chance to challenge you personally with the next question. Do you consider yourself an active Ubuntu contributor? I'm trying to understand how laypress sponsorship jives with Jono's explanation of the sponsorship process. Do you feel that sponsoring laypress from the same budget that sponsors active contributors to UDS is a fair use of funds? If you knew that your ticket and hotel could have paid for an active contributor to show up and engage in discussions and take on work items that need to be done in the next cycle would you have chosen to give your sponsorship to that contributor?
-jef
Posted May 17, 2011 18:48 UTC (Tue)
by jake (editor, #205)
[Link] (1 responses)
I don't really know about Google, Apple, or Red Hat's policies in this regard. They don't really have "equivalent" events as far as I can tell (FUDCon might be the exception there). I have been sponsored by the Linux Foundation for various events (LinuxCon, Collab, MeeGo, probably others), by GNOME for GUADEC, and by CELF for various ELC and ELCE events, perhaps others as well.
> I think you punched Shuttleworth in the mouth a little with your
Sorry you (and others evidently) think so, it was not my intent. I was trying to give an accurate picture of what he said.
> Do you consider yourself an active Ubuntu contributor?
No. As I understand it, my sponsorship did not go through the usual UDS sponsorship channels. It came, I think, from the marketing budget.
jake
Posted May 27, 2011 6:51 UTC (Fri)
by AdamW (subscriber, #48457)
[Link]
I know some conferences sponsor journalists to attend.
Posted May 17, 2011 18:55 UTC (Tue)
by corbet (editor, #1)
[Link] (51 responses)
The notion that we are, by virtue of writing about what happened at an event, somehow less deserving of travel sponsorship is just a little offensive.
In general we have tended to avoid distribution-specific events (or desktop-project-specific events) because we've always figured that somebody from an opposing camp would complain. We can't possibly attend every distribution's conference, so we normally attend none. Perhaps we need to stick to that in the future.
Posted May 17, 2011 19:12 UTC (Tue)
by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
[Link] (6 responses)
I would say that if its common practice for an organizing entity to sponsor journos, I think sponsored journos should include that information in any article about the event as part of disclosure.
And since Jono's description of the UDS sponsoring process added just this week doesn't mention journos as a special group...I was misled into thinking it was a common budget based on the chatter I was seeing about the original gripe. If there's a separate pot of money for journos then its not a problem. But like I said, from the chatter I'm seeing, that's not necessarily the impression. A clear statement about how journos are selected which parallel's Jono's description of UDS contributor sponsorship would probably make things clearer.
-jef
Posted May 17, 2011 19:24 UTC (Tue)
by corbet (editor, #1)
[Link] (2 responses)
A reasonable case could certainly be made for better disclosure of travel sponsorship, anyway.
Posted May 17, 2011 19:40 UTC (Tue)
by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
[Link]
And indeed having press at an event does add value for the journalist and the organizer and the readership. I would not suggest otherwise. But there are ethical considerations for the industry to consider when journalists are dependent on sponsorships from organizing entities.
I believe it would be adequate disclosure for anyone who attends and event and is sponsored to attend an event should disclose their sponsorship, whether they attended strictly as a contributor to participate or as a journalist to cover the story, or as a mix of both. It is good practice for a number of reason to disclose sponsorship depending on your particular situation as a sponsored individual. The GNOME devs who write personal blogs do a pretty good job consistently tagging GNOME Foundation sponsorships for events they attend and write about for example, though for completely different reasons than the reasons I would expect a journalist to disclose sponsorship to their readership.
-jef
Posted May 17, 2011 21:42 UTC (Tue)
by mgross (guest, #38112)
[Link]
Posted May 18, 2011 2:02 UTC (Wed)
by nzjrs (guest, #35911)
[Link] (2 responses)
I'm presuming you are referring to the OMGUbuntu folks.
I think elevating or equating OMG with LWN is an insult to the quality and depth of reporting at LWN.
I guess I don't see what mystery there is to get to the bottom of.
If LWN was picked because they were better (more technical, more thorough) journalists then I cant disagree. If they were picked because it was their turn then I have no objection. I can't imagine a cynical third option (if the goal was to provide positive coverage) that would result in LWN being chosen over OMG.
Posted May 18, 2011 3:38 UTC (Wed)
by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
[Link] (1 responses)
But I am stating that we'll all benefit from adequate disclosure about sponsorship. And I personally think the LWN team is probably the best example of journalistic standards in our little pocket of spacetime. And since I think that, I also think they'd listen to a reasonable request that such disclosures be made a common practice when such sponsorship occurs. Trust me, I'm not making a direct comparison between LWN and any other journalistic effort. There's no comparison.
To his credit, Jake didn't drag his feet about answering the question about sponsorship when I asked it. Asked and answered, no hedging no backpedaling..just a straight up answer..even though they know he openned himself up to criticism with the answer. I can't expect anything more than that. It's refreshing to get a clean answer even when the question is challenging in nature.
I'm not going to hold a grudge for the LWN team for not thinking about sponsorship disclosure as a matter of policy up till this point. I certainly didn't ever think about it before now. But I am thinking about it, and I think there's a reasonable chance they'll consider making disclosure part of their standard operating policy.
-jef
Posted May 18, 2011 4:01 UTC (Wed)
by jake (editor, #205)
[Link]
I never really considered that, exactly. I have at various points thanked sponsors in my articles from conferences, typically in some kind of wrap-up article. But, I am sure I have forgotten more than a few times as well.
I have no problem "disclosing" that kind of information at all. But I am surprised that some think it is really all that significant in terms of determining biases. We all have biases, and most of what goes into those biases cannot be quantified by things like 'were sponsored to go to XYZ conference by ABC org'. There are plenty of other, less visible things that *could* be contributing to my biases (corporate subscriptions and advertising are two obvious possibilities).
In order to create a bias filter for a site or a writer, I think you have to read the material and compare it to what else you know of the subject of the article and go from there. Over some period of time, you will get a feel for where the biases are, and whether you trust the site/writer to, generally, accurately report things. I can certainly disclose that someone paid for some of the expenses to get me to a place where I could cover an event, but for all you know they (or a competitor) were handing me $100 bills hourly.
It just seems obvious to me that the only way to really figure out what the biases of a given writer/publication are is by reading it and forming your own opinions. Finding out about sponsorships might seem like it helps, and maybe it does, but it's really no substitute for reading and thinking about what's written.
jake
Posted May 17, 2011 19:12 UTC (Tue)
by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
[Link]
Posted May 17, 2011 19:20 UTC (Tue)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link] (34 responses)
LWN does a very good job of being even-handed in it's reporting (better than any other organisation I know of writing about the industry), That may be why this article stood out in that if anything, the choice of quotes seems to be aimed at putting Mark in a bad light (very few articles have this many direct quotes), so LWN is definitely not falling down this slope.
I would be disappointed if concerns over this made it so that LWN appeared at fewer events.
Posted May 17, 2011 19:28 UTC (Tue)
by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
[Link] (30 responses)
-jef
Posted May 17, 2011 20:44 UTC (Tue)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link] (29 responses)
there has always been tension in the FOSS community between those who are willing to make compromises in order to provide needed functionality now and those who will do without the functionality until it's free.
Mark has clearly placed himself (and Ubuntu) in the camp of those willing to so things that the other camp isn't willing to do in order to provide functionality now. He is far from being alone in that camp (Linus is another vocal member of that camp) and his description of the other camp as being 'ideologues' is not unexpected (or, in my mind particularly inappropriate, what would)
the problem that he talks about where companies start to open up and get hammered for what they haven't opened yet rather than thanked for what they have opened is a serious problem
I also don't think that anyone disagrees with the '80% complete' problem that he describes.
the need or lack thereof for contributor agreements is a matter where there is a lot more disagreement. It's good that he isn't happy with the current Cannonical agreement, I don't think anyone is and the big thing that he needs to do is to make it clear what he is trying to do with this agreement and re-write the agreement to provide the appropriate guidelines (it may be good enough to add guarantees that the software will always be available under a particular license or class of license in addition to any proprietary licenses that are granted)
I do think that it's a good thing that Mark had decided that it's acceptable for Cannonical to sign contributer agreements when submitting patches to other projects , as that should reduce the friction involved.
but as long as the FSF is requiring contributor agreements, many of the more vocal people really have a hard time arguing that the concept of a contributor agreement is evil.
Posted May 17, 2011 21:04 UTC (Tue)
by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
[Link]
If he's going to talk the talk, Canonical needs to walk the walk. And with LibreOffice, Canonical walked away from corporate management of the codebase and embraced open co-development. Mark can't have his cake and eat it to, try as he might. Canonical showed real leadership in how quickly they embraced Libreoffice.
And he still gets the details of the Qt copyright assignment history wrong. Qt had a BSD relicense nuclear option for like a decade+ tied to its dual licensing model. If the open development tree closed down, a non-profit entities had the authority to relicense the last available open development codebase as BSD. That is a _huge_ offset against bad faith proprietary re-licensing. He continues to gloss over that history when holding up Qt. I've even said that Qt's nuclear option seemed like a fair trade-off to protect long term contributor interests. More disturbingly I don't believe the Harmony drafts make room for that sort of creative long term balance of interests..at least not explicitly. So if anything Harmony may push that sort of pragmatic balance of corporate and contributor business interests off the table as a future model for engagement.
Shuttleworth is not one to let little things like "facts" get in the way of his goals to craft perception and opinion towards the ends that best suit his personal interests.
-jef
Posted May 17, 2011 21:05 UTC (Tue)
by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
[Link]
I don't think anybody considers it "evil" and any such portrayal is very unhelpful however many would consider copyright assignment as problematic when commercial companies use it and it is especially problematic when people point to FSF as a justification for it as they invariably do because FSF is a non-profit organization with a legal mandate for serving the public while commercial organizations are not and FSF copyright assignment gives a legal guarantee and FSF's own history makes it clear that they would never release contributed code under a proprietary license.
http://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/assigning-copyright
Posted May 17, 2011 21:19 UTC (Tue)
by quaid (guest, #26101)
[Link] (26 responses)
So I work for Red Hat on community organizing, and have been involved with many discussions directly with real software vendors (ISVs) who range from a spectrum of "all code is already open source but no community around it" to "maybe we'll open source something one day."
This assertion that companies get treated poorly in open communities is not an uncommon fear of these companies. But where is the evidence?
When I have observed these many companies interacting in open communities, or thinking about it, or doing anything, it is rare that I have seen a truly poor interaction that originated from someone in the community. Some mis-communication happens, but rarely, rarely is it an outright attack of the sort Mr. Shuttleworth tells hearsay about.
Aside from the general recognition to treat all potential contributors fairly, even corporations, in the last decade there has been a growth in professional open source developers who impact the quality of discussion in the open communities. I'm sure there ARE companies who have bad experiences, and I'm sure that a percentage of those are not directly at fault for that reaction. But is it an actual problem? Or just perceived as one?
What are the real facts? How close is the reality to the unsupported assertion Mr. Shuttleworth seems to simply repeat?
Considering that this is cornerstone of his long-thinking on the subject, I would hope he has at least done some market research. Not just talked with peer executives at other ISVs, who all repeat the same urban legends without any more evidence than hearsay.
My contrast, I turn to Dr. Dan Frye, who is the VP of IBM's open source developer group. In the below video, he talks about how THEY made the mistakes in their initial forays in to open source development. He didn't blame the community for their reaction. He fixed his house. Today, IBM has a process for evaluating how to join an open source community so they can avoid stomping in with giant boots-of-destruction:
http://video.linux.com/video/1381
Posted May 17, 2011 21:26 UTC (Tue)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link] (23 responses)
This isn't just Mark imagining things.
Posted May 17, 2011 21:35 UTC (Tue)
by quaid (guest, #26101)
[Link] (3 responses)
Agreed, nor am I imagining my own experience. (Which is that more companies strangle themselves in the open source crib than get strangled by external folks.)
But I'm not claiming my experience is the way things are, everywhere, and asking others to accept that anecdotal experience as unverified fact. Nor am I using it as the basis for an unpopular position.
Posted May 17, 2011 21:38 UTC (Tue)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link] (2 responses)
if saying that is an unpopular position, then more people need to take such an unpopular position.
Posted May 17, 2011 22:32 UTC (Tue)
by quaid (guest, #26101)
[Link] (1 responses)
If the problem isn't as he describes it, then perhaps his conclusion of what to do is not the right answer?
His direction regarding CLAs is at least called in to question if he is basing that direction on the opinion that there is a wide spread problem if there is no evidence of that problem other than anecdotal.
Posted May 18, 2011 1:06 UTC (Wed)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link]
I don't think that his solution will solve the problem, but I think he's entitled to try it and see if he can make it work (there are a lot of companies out there that I would not have thought that there was enough to make it work)
I would disagree with straight copyright assignment, but I don't see anything fundamentally wrong with the right to dual license (which is not the same as making proprietary derivatives). I see this as giving people who want to use the code two options 'support the project by contributing code' or 'support the project by contributing money so that the project can buy time to generate code'.
I know that some people are not willing to accept that as choice for their code (especially if they are outsiders, not part of the organization that would be getting the money), and to those folks I would say, find a different project to contribute to, there's no shortage of worthy causes. I will also guarantee that you will not always agree with the choices the organization makes, and for that it doesn't matter what organization, be it Cannonical or the FSF.
Posted May 18, 2011 8:33 UTC (Wed)
by dneary (guest, #55185)
[Link] (18 responses)
As have I. I would say that there are a number of factors at play here: Companies who are honest about the extent of their investment in community projects get a lot of credit. Companies who are not honest about the extent of their investment (potentially to themselves) get criticised. What I mean by this is: if a company makes an announcement that "we're releasing software X, it's going to be completely community run", and then the governance rules are blatantly skewed to favour the company, then they're going to be criticised. If instead they say "we're releasing this as open source software, but we plan to continue maintaining the core (but patch proposals are welcome)" they will get a free pass. Companies who leave themselves open to criticism like this lose respect fast, and there is a significant faction in most communities that are extremely, aggressively harsh towards entities they don't respect.
This is not a good state of affairs - and I would like to see the vocal minority think of companies as groups of individuals, each worthy of basic respect, rather than a big amorphous entity that you can freely kick around without hurting anyone's feelings. Companies which are trusted, and lose that trust, have a long, hard battle to gain it back. Take the example of Sun, who announced open-sourcing of Solaris after a successful collaboration with GNOME. They never recovered from the criticism they got for OpenSolaris, Java, etc - and nothing they did (including for example relicencing Java as GPL) was good enough to regain the trust they'd lost by messing up the initial release of OpenSolaris. Canonical feels to me to be in a similar situation - slowly spending their community capital and progressively losing the trust of their supporters, until no matter what they do they will be criticised because it won't be good enough. This is a really hard situation to be in as a company. If you mess up your first interaction with a project, you can spend years repairing the relationship & regaining trust. You do it in baby steps, by showing that you're learning, by entrusting individuals to represent you in communities, and by having those individuals do things in the community's interests.
On the other hand, I have seen companies progressively increase their interaction with communities, and each additional step is met with approval and thanks. Or companies that are forthright that while their product is free software, that they're going to maintain control of their core product, and that's been accepted by their user community. The difference is in the fall from grace and loss of trust. So my best advice to companies thinking about interacting with a free software community is: start small, be honest with yourself & others. Gain trust through your actions, and then handle that trust carefully.
Dave.
Posted May 18, 2011 22:08 UTC (Wed)
by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458)
[Link] (17 responses)
Sorry, but Sun did not fix their problem with Java (witness the heat Oracle is now raining on Android over that same code) or their other open source projects (placing OpenSolaris under their expressly not GPL compatible license). So it isn't that they invested years of hard work in regaining confidence, they lost whatever they had fair and square and did precious little to gain it back.
Posted May 19, 2011 7:23 UTC (Thu)
by dneary (guest, #55185)
[Link] (16 responses)
The main problem people had with Java is "it's not released under the GPL". Then it was. But that was too late, the confidence had been lost, and so people were looking for the catch, and they found it - "the conformance suit isn't available under a free licence".
If Sun's first announcement was "Java released under GPL, but Sun to maintain control of Java trademark" then I think everyone's reaction would have been "fair enough, woohoo". Because this was a 2nd or 3rd step, after an initial "freeing Java" announcement (and in combination with the history around Solaris), people were saying "boo, hiss - holding something back".
Which I think was mostly unfair.
> placing OpenSolaris under their expressly not GPL compatible license
Since when does every free software licence have to be GPL compatible? It would have been nice, but releasing it as free software is better than not releasing it as free software. This is a case in point of what Mark is saying - "not enough" is an all too frequent chant.
Cheers,
Posted May 19, 2011 15:09 UTC (Thu)
by nye (subscriber, #51576)
[Link] (15 responses)
You forgot 'passing the non-free conformance test is a condition for being able to use the numerous wide-reaching patents over which we will eventually sue you'. As catches go, a massive lawsuit probably counts as quite a big one.
Posted May 19, 2011 15:13 UTC (Thu)
by dneary (guest, #55185)
[Link] (14 responses)
Ah, I don't care about patents, and I encourage every other free software developer not to care about patents. It is an issue orthogonal to software freedom and the licence of the software.
Dave.
Posted May 19, 2011 15:34 UTC (Thu)
by nye (subscriber, #51576)
[Link] (13 responses)
Do you have any justification for this rather extraordinary assertion?
> and the licence of the software.
Yes, obviously.
Posted May 19, 2011 15:39 UTC (Thu)
by dneary (guest, #55185)
[Link] (12 responses)
The Linux kernel is patent encumbered. The GIMP saved GIFs when LZW was still patented.
This does not prevent either from being free software.
Mind me asking what was extraordinary about my assertion?
Dave.
Posted May 20, 2011 21:49 UTC (Fri)
by DOT (subscriber, #58786)
[Link] (11 responses)
Posted May 20, 2011 23:36 UTC (Fri)
by dneary (guest, #55185)
[Link] (10 responses)
Then no software is free.
Dave.
Posted May 21, 2011 5:40 UTC (Sat)
by faramir (subscriber, #2327)
[Link] (2 responses)
Are you saying that ALL software is covered by
Posted May 21, 2011 6:29 UTC (Sat)
by dark (guest, #8483)
[Link]
Either way, how can you prove for any piece of software that it's not covered by any patents?
Posted Jun 5, 2011 5:47 UTC (Sun)
by JanC_ (guest, #34940)
[Link]
Posted May 21, 2011 9:54 UTC (Sat)
by DOT (subscriber, #58786)
[Link] (6 responses)
Posted May 21, 2011 10:30 UTC (Sat)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link] (1 responses)
for example, the RCU patent has been licensed to all software under the GPL IIRC
Posted May 22, 2011 8:22 UTC (Sun)
by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
[Link]
Posted May 22, 2011 21:13 UTC (Sun)
by dneary (guest, #55185)
[Link] (3 responses)
I would say *proven* to infringe a patent. And that needs a court case. And a bucketload of money. And not $1 bills.
So, all software is free, and the patent system is broken, and keeps approving patents which, if challenged, would be invalidated. So, as I said, I don't worry about patents, and I don't think a patent should ever be a reason not to write a piece of free software.
Cheers,
Posted May 22, 2011 23:11 UTC (Sun)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link]
Posted May 27, 2011 7:04 UTC (Fri)
by AdamW (subscriber, #48457)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted May 29, 2011 18:50 UTC (Sun)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link]
For example, where I live, software patents are EXplicitly NOT permitted. Unfortunately, that doesn't stop the EPO granting them in contravention of their constitution :-(
Cheers,
Posted May 22, 2011 7:57 UTC (Sun)
by nhippi (subscriber, #34640)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted May 22, 2011 8:09 UTC (Sun)
by halla (subscriber, #14185)
[Link]
Posted May 17, 2011 20:50 UTC (Tue)
by ofeeley (guest, #36105)
[Link]
It's impossible to know if the choice of quotes is aimed at anything, or is instead a fair representation of the interview. That's why journalists often keep a recording. Given Jake's previous reporting it might be fair to assume that he managed to capture the essence of the interview and in order to reinforce his interpretation provided quotes to anchor it.
If you look at the companion piece[1] about UDS you'll see that the same style (short, inlined quotes) is used.
Posted May 17, 2011 21:51 UTC (Tue)
by cmccabe (guest, #60281)
[Link] (1 responses)
He is clearly frustrated that FOSS is a cost center rather than a profit center for companies. For example, Google and Facebook spend money on FOSS to support their operations, but they don't directly make money from FOSS. It is an expense for them, like air conditioning or health care.
Shuttleworth seems to think that using copyright assignment, companies can offer premium version of their projects alongside open source ones. This would allow them to generate a revenue stream of their own.
It would have been nice to have fewer, longer excerpts from the speech. Having just a few whole paragraphs would probably have been better. But it's not like the content of this speech should surprise anyone. He's been saying these things for years. It's kind of like seeing "breaking news: Pope thinks Jesus is a great guy" in the headlines.
P.S. I don't think I agree with Mark... copyright assignment seems to separate communities into first-class citizens who get the profit from selling proprietary licenses and second-class citizens who never will. But that's another issue and it's been discussed many times elsewhere...
Posted May 18, 2011 9:44 UTC (Wed)
by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
[Link]
They may not actually make money, but it certainly saves them money. Linux lets Google use commodity PCs for their server farms, and imagine the aggregated cost of those Windows licenses/maintenance/Â….
Besides, I'm sure that, from a strategy POV, Google would hate being dependent on their biggest competitor for their operating system. If Linux didn't exist, it might even be worth Google's while to write their own operating system just to be »free«.
Posted May 18, 2011 21:02 UTC (Wed)
by piggy (guest, #18693)
[Link]
It would sadden me if this were the outcome. I certainly appreciated the coverage reported here. I count on LWN occasionally attending many of the conferences that I would love to attend myself.
Posted May 19, 2011 9:13 UTC (Thu)
by jschrod (subscriber, #1646)
[Link]
No, please don't. It gives us a chance to learn what's going on at other distributions. I like to hear about UDS or about Fedora meetings, it's interesting information. Please, don't let the jspaleta's obsessed search for Shuttleworth/Canonical misdoings influence your journalistic decisions. That you can let the respective organizations pay for your travel and conference costs, is a trust situation that you (both you personally, and LWN.net as a whole) earned with impartial reporting in the past.
Posted May 19, 2011 9:30 UTC (Thu)
by fb (guest, #53265)
[Link] (5 responses)
I personally wish that you would _not_ stick to that in the future. The conference reports are, at least to me, useful and interesting.
Please (*please*) don't let (what I see as) jspaleta "trolling on all things Ubuntu" influence LWN policies and choices. I mean, are we to get less coverage on Ubuntu because jspaleta has nothing better to do than post 50 times in _every_ Ubuntu/Canonical story?
Posted May 19, 2011 10:11 UTC (Thu)
by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
[Link] (2 responses)
And again, I'll re-iterate that I'm not complaining about Jake's attendance at UDS. I'm _not_ asking for some sort of sham "fair and balanced" stupidity for event coverage either. I do not expect LWN to try to be at every possible event to cover all bases and all factions. And like you I don't think they should go out of their way to avoid "camp" specific events either.
I do think its better for all of us in the readership that travel sponsorship is disclosed as a matter of policy. And to Jake's credit he added a sponsorship thank you in the newest weekly edition article summarizing the UDS experience, which more than meets any reasonable sponsorship disclosure request I could ask for as a member of the readership.
It could very well be that we need to find more ways to get press sponsored to attend conference events to raise the profile of working going on in the ecosystem. And I have no problem with that, as long as we make it a cultural norm to disclose sponsorship.
-jef
Posted May 19, 2011 14:07 UTC (Thu)
by bfields (subscriber, #19510)
[Link] (1 responses)
Most of us heard you the first time, even if you for some reason feel that one particular commenter didn't.
Please do us all the favor of stating your position once as well as you can, and then sitting out unless you have something to say that an intelligent reader wouldn't be able to figure out on their own from a previous post.
(Apologies for the off-topic post.)
Posted May 19, 2011 15:44 UTC (Thu)
by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
[Link]
-jef
Posted May 19, 2011 14:01 UTC (Thu)
by stevem (subscriber, #1512)
[Link]
Also +1 on not letting jspaleta put you off!
Posted May 20, 2011 18:59 UTC (Fri)
by Kluge (guest, #2881)
[Link]
Posted May 17, 2011 22:06 UTC (Tue)
by pzb (guest, #656)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted May 18, 2011 0:47 UTC (Wed)
by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
[Link] (2 responses)
-jef
Posted May 18, 2011 1:22 UTC (Wed)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link]
providing assistance for press to attend is less common in the FOSS world, if for no other reason than that the budgets tend to be small.
but in the commercial world, high-value give-aways are very common, even to attendees. This is a large part of the reason that many press people end up getting the reputation as shills and I believe that it's a large part of the reason that the traditional press (including many magazines) are of such poor quality.
I can't point at specifics on the commercial side, but if you read the write-ups after just about any major commercial event, it seems pretty obvious.
Posted May 18, 2011 1:30 UTC (Wed)
by pzb (guest, #656)
[Link]
I was thinking of events like: There are tons more, these are just a few that come to mind. I'm not sure if you would call all of these FLOSS ecosystem entities, but all contribute to FLOSS or have large percentages their software running on Linux. Admittedly none of these is really the same as UDS, but Canonical does not run a user conference similar to the above to my knowledge.
Posted May 17, 2011 20:39 UTC (Tue)
by aryonoco (guest, #55563)
[Link] (7 responses)
On the topic of contributor agreements, as a long time sceptic of contributor agreements, this was the first time that I began to understand Mark's vision and where he is going.
If free software projects generally own their own code base, and design a business plan to generate revenue around it and become self sufficient, this could strengthen the whole free software ecosystem. Unfortunately for Mark, I don't think this will happen.
Shuttleworth has poured his resources and years of his life contributing to the community. Even if you are not an Ubuntu user and have never benefitted from a Canonical-developed technology, I doubt that his creation of Canonical and Ubuntu have hurt anyone, so I find the level of antagonism and hostility by some community members towards him, baffling.
Posted May 17, 2011 21:10 UTC (Tue)
by moofar (guest, #70283)
[Link] (4 responses)
Posted May 17, 2011 21:29 UTC (Tue)
by aryonoco (guest, #55563)
[Link] (3 responses)
Has the world really suffered that much due to the availability of Qt under a commercial license, as well at GPL and LGPL?
Just to make it clear, I am not arguing in favour of contribution agreements. I believe they don't work, simply because they introduce a barrier to participation which discourages many to join, as well as the fact that most free software is developed by the "lone hacker" or collection of "lone hackers" who are not necessarily interested in building a business around their idea (and might not be good at doing so either). But the man has a vision and he's earnt the right to try his hand at it. It's perverse to twist Shuttleworth's words to claim that he is advocating for proprietary software.
Posted May 17, 2011 21:54 UTC (Tue)
by moofar (guest, #70283)
[Link] (2 responses)
The second sentence is equal to "He is advocating selling proprietary software." Owning copyright gives you only one kind of revenue-generating power. All other ways to generate revenue do not require copyright ownership. My statement is valid, he is arguing for proprietary software to help free software.
I am not saying he is wrong, but the fact that he, like you, tries to skirt around and obfuscate the rather simple way that free software people see things is really not going to help his cause.
Posted May 17, 2011 22:01 UTC (Tue)
by moofar (guest, #70283)
[Link]
Posted May 18, 2011 10:09 UTC (Wed)
by pboddie (guest, #50784)
[Link]
The above quote has probably the most insight per word of the entire discussion. Copyright assignment is not merely about one specific kind of revenue generation: it is about exclusivity with respect to that kind of activity. And although people try to bring copyleft licences into this as some kind of problem - albeit only a "problem" if you want to make proprietary software and you're left staring at a copyleft licence - the actual issue is not which licence is attached to a "code drop" from an entity owning the code; it is the presence of double standards from the owner: that the community should believe and participate in the development of Free Software, but the owner would like to make some money from proprietary software. This isn't problematic if the owner really developed the code themselves or rewarded those who did - there's a discussion to be had about whether a contributor is "rewarded" by being able to participate in a project and to use that project's code in the first place - but when a community of people have made the project into what it is, those people might regard the financial exploitation of their work as unfair. Economists and others might argue that the inequality of the roles in such projects should naturally lead to a smaller community of outsiders. People who care about the availability as Free Software of their contributions might be more likely to contribute to projects which employ copyleft licences. However, such people may object to their contributions being used in proprietary software through copyright assignment or special licence grants. But if companies want to build a community around their software, they have to consider such issues carefully. No company would enter a new field completely uninformed, so I don't really sympathise with the sentiments about people being unfriendly to clumsy businesses.
Posted May 18, 2011 16:37 UTC (Wed)
by pspinler (subscriber, #2922)
[Link] (1 responses)
Quote: "First of all, unlike what many people are saying here, I thought the piece was very well done, insightful, and balanced. Thank you Jake for the piece, and thanks you Jonathan for running it."
Ditto, my thanks also. This was important to cover, and seems to be a pretty good attempt at remaining balanced.
-- Pat
Posted May 18, 2011 19:27 UTC (Wed)
by bfields (subscriber, #19510)
[Link]
Posted May 17, 2011 20:42 UTC (Tue)
by moofar (guest, #70283)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted May 18, 2011 2:32 UTC (Wed)
by dberkholz (guest, #23346)
[Link]
Posted May 17, 2011 21:21 UTC (Tue)
by stefanha (subscriber, #55072)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted May 27, 2011 7:15 UTC (Fri)
by AdamW (subscriber, #48457)
[Link]
What's much more controversial are contributor agreements which require copyright assignment: not just you keeping copyright of your code but granting specific rights to it to the project in question, but you actually assigning ownership of the contribution to the project.
It's important not to conflate the two.
Posted May 17, 2011 22:23 UTC (Tue)
by neilbrown (subscriber, #359)
[Link] (10 responses)
The suggestion is that it would be good for the FLOSS community to motivate/enable developers to put more effort into those boring bits (true) and that funneling money with the right strings attached is probably the best way to do that (also probably true).
The next step in the chain of reasoning is that the best way to funnel that money is to enable FLOSS developers to sell something to one group of people while still being able to share most of that thing freely with another group of people. I think this is the link in the chain that many people really have a problem with, so they/we don't have any patience with the next link in the chain which is contributor agreements.
So I wonder if the conversation we need to be having is not so much about contributor agreements as about business models. Certainly some models have been found that channel some funding into FLOSS but it seems they aren't enough. In particular they don't seem to help with the "last 20%" problem. Is there a new business model?
The "app store" model has shown that you can make a lot of money by selling something for 99c to enough people. The "humble bundles" show that people are willing to pay for quality when given the opportunity.
It feels like there should be a model that allows those who want to fund software to be "* supporters *" and there by enable developers to finish the job, but I have no idea what it is.... I'm sure it isn't a "--donate" option on all programs....
Posted May 17, 2011 23:12 UTC (Tue)
by moofar (guest, #70283)
[Link] (8 responses)
Posted May 18, 2011 2:44 UTC (Wed)
by denials (subscriber, #3413)
[Link]
If you search for "donate project-name" in major search engines, quite often you'll find the answer to your questions. Here are some worthy ones to consider, IMO:
Posted May 18, 2011 5:00 UTC (Wed)
by pabs (subscriber, #43278)
[Link] (6 responses)
Posted May 18, 2011 10:08 UTC (Wed)
by fb (guest, #53265)
[Link] (1 responses)
I am pretty sure that there are a lot of people like me:
As always, convenience also plays a large role. I would certainly donate _more_ often to different projects if there was a "FOSS donate shop" that made it more convenient for me to donate for software I use a lot.
Posted May 18, 2011 11:53 UTC (Wed)
by Trelane (subscriber, #56877)
[Link]
The formal process I'm most familiar with is GNOME's "Friend of GNOME" stuff (http://www-old.gnome.org/friends/) and particularly their "Adopt a hacker" program.
Informally, hackers sometimes post their needs on planet gnome, e.g. when seif needed a new laptop and set up a paypal donation system so that those so inclined could pitch in. Some of the projects (e.g. zeitgeist) have a paypal donate button, and other hackers have things like amazon wishlists.
HTH!
Posted May 18, 2011 10:22 UTC (Wed)
by pboddie (guest, #50784)
[Link] (3 responses)
Such organisations often don't want to frivolously spend money on things that wouldn't help the project in some way - massive billboard advertising or "Brewster's Millions" endeavours are seen as being irresponsible with other people's money - and thus they can get bogged down in micromanaging grants for worthy causes. Even with a healthy stream of worthy causes being suggested (adding functionality, writing manuals or courses), there's always the concern that such activities won't be sustainable after the paid individuals have finished their work: might such things not just add to the project's workload?
That said, I see a certain amount of benefit in targeted donations where someone might say that they have a specific objective and will pay for it to happen, thus providing the worthy cause and the cash. That isn't so different from a "bounty" - something that Mr Shuttleworth used to offer for various Python projects, as I recall.
Posted May 19, 2011 19:03 UTC (Thu)
by sorpigal (guest, #36106)
[Link] (2 responses)
Maybe feature bounties is the right way to go, but I've never seen that work well for unsexy work.
Posted May 19, 2011 19:41 UTC (Thu)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link] (1 responses)
or does it mean that if anyone working on a project is getting paid that people who aren't getting paid shouldn't contribute?
Posted May 20, 2011 0:22 UTC (Fri)
by pabs (subscriber, #43278)
[Link]
Google's model of introducing monetary motivation seems to be working well, at least from an outsider's point of view.
This is getting off-topic though, we need a separate article.
Posted May 18, 2011 8:29 UTC (Wed)
by mjthayer (guest, #39183)
[Link]
The idea of a "donate" button on the bugtracker just crossed my mind. Without any guarantees of fixing, but at least raising the visibility of the bug.
Alternatively, people could donate money towards a particular bug which would be "released" to whoever fixes the bug, or to the project if the person didn't want the money. This would only work for projects that accepted donations of course. It needn't even be run by the project itself - someone else could manage the money and the administration for a percentage of the donations. I know there are things like this already, but as far as I recall they have been pledge things, not donate up front ones.
Posted May 18, 2011 8:26 UTC (Wed)
by shmget (guest, #58347)
[Link] (7 responses)
in other words: companies are more likely to open-up their software if they can get developers to work for free then turn around and sell that work under a closed licensed... Gee the best of both world right? Well for the 'company' at least...
And people spending their free-time writing code should not be 'selfish'? by insisting that the fruit of their labor remain open-sourced ? really ?
Posted May 19, 2011 3:21 UTC (Thu)
by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
[Link] (6 responses)
I personally have said that I think the confusion of gratis vs. libre and a definite undercurrent of people who want something for nothing has stunted an industry which could build a lot more cool things if developers could be better supported for their work.
Posted May 19, 2011 3:54 UTC (Thu)
by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted May 19, 2011 17:49 UTC (Thu)
by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
[Link]
Maybe in an alternate reality what if major open source projects were organized as corporations owned by the major developers that charged license fees or had revenue sharing agreements with distributers. Everyone who puts significant effort in gets a cut and can maybe support themselves full time working on projects. You see this kind of thing in the games industry all the time these days, single developer shops or very small companies putting out small, inexpensive, high-quality releases and finding personal and financial success. It seems a shame that this model is translated so poorly to the open source "world".
Posted May 19, 2011 15:23 UTC (Thu)
by shmget (guest, #58347)
[Link] (3 responses)
no, that is not what I'm saying.
Another evil of the dual open/close model is that the company that manage the project as incentive to reject perfectly good open-source contribution because they have implemented it on the closed-source side of the house and don;t want to cannibalize their business... in other words making patch inclusion/rejection decision based purely on their business interest and not on the merit of the patch...
Posted May 19, 2011 19:36 UTC (Thu)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link] (2 responses)
one model is to have the exact same code with multiple licenses, one open, one closed.
personally I don't have a problem with this, either way supports the product (the open license with code, the closed license with money), and even RMS doesn't have a problem with this approach
the second model is the one you are concerned with where the company has a limited product under an open license, and an 'enhanced' product under a closed license.
I think this can be done sanely, and don't have a big problem with it, but it does have the problem that you describe where a company may be reluctant to implement something in the open version that they have implemented in the closed version
I believe that ghostscript is an example of this done sanely. As I understand it they develop enhancements that go into a closed version, but that version automatically becomes open after a given time period
Posted May 20, 2011 15:06 UTC (Fri)
by shmget (guest, #58347)
[Link] (1 responses)
"As I understand it they develop enhancements that go into a closed version, but that version automatically becomes open after a given time period"
That sound like a reasonable compromise I could live with...
Bear in mind that 'Corporations' are psychopathic by design (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corporation )
Posted May 20, 2011 18:22 UTC (Fri)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link]
>I don't understand. why bother with the later then ? what's the benefit ?
the benifit is that companies that are paranoid about GPL 'infection' no longer need to worry about it. MySQL's business was based on doing exactly this, selling the same code that was available under the GPL under a closed license for people who didn't want to comply with the GPL (or were afraid of what the GPL could require them to do, even if it didn't)
I agree that full copyright assignment is overkill for any of this. I'm not trying to claim that full copyright assignment is needed for anything.
however I am saying that there are reasonable ways to dual-license code, and that if an organization is going to do so, they will need some contributer agreement that gives them the right to do so with the code contributed from outsiders.
copyright assignment gives the company the ability to so this, but it's not the only way for this to happen
Posted May 18, 2011 14:13 UTC (Wed)
by sdalley (subscriber, #18550)
[Link] (1 responses)
But ... I worry that Ubuntu isn't really an ongoing viable business model. If I contribute to Ubuntu, it's nice to know that it's going somewhere long-term. If its sustainability is dependent on its rich and philanthropic owner being able to make a small fortune out of a large one, rather than pay its own way as a going concern, then I do wonder.
For the benefit I get from it, I would be more than happy to pay for version updates on a Magnatune sort of basis (you may pay either the suggested amount, or more or less down to zero depending on your circumstances and inclination), and in return get funded development of better opensource video drivers, Wayland, reliable suspend/resume, LibreOffice import/export filter improvements, Active Directory functionality, top-notch documentation and other things of lasting value that need that final 20% uphill push.
There are many obstacles to this of course:
1) Interpretation of the GPL. The GPL allows to charge for "support" and "the cost of physically transferring a copy". It does not forbid donations. IIRC RMS/FSF used to get by, pre-internet, from doing tapes of GNU software at $150 a pop. The Ubuntu web presence infrastructure must cost a bomb to keep running, and an allocation of the overhead cost to a suggested download charge would IMO be both reasonable and within the spirit of the GPL.
2) Ubuntu's front-page promise to "always remain free". This would need a substantial re-spin to "libre" rather than "gratis".
3) The appropriate separation of Canonical and Ubuntu so that payments were not seen as donations to a millionaire.
4) Competition from Red Hat and Novell.
In conclusion, very interesting piece, thanks LWN for your efforts! If they succeed in getting a productive discussion going on business viability, every cent of travel expenses will have been incredible value. Not that we should begrudge it anyway ...
Posted May 20, 2011 13:14 UTC (Fri)
by wookey (guest, #5501)
[Link]
I think you're confusing source and binary distribution rules here. Nothing in the GPL prevents making a charge for binaries. The rules are about charges for source (if it's not already accompanying the binaries). http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
Actually selling GPLed binaries isn't practised much because everyone else can give it away so the price is strongly driven towards zero. And almost all entities just start there and leave it there. Buy people do pay for GPLed software in various circumstances, e.g from app stores (or at last I assume they do).
Posted May 18, 2011 15:28 UTC (Wed)
by edelsohn (guest, #16472)
[Link] (2 responses)
"the idea of freedom is more important than the reality", and those people may "die happy" knowing that their ideal was never breached, but that isn't what's best for free software, its adoption, and expansion.
Mark is trying to bring clarity to this issue and force the FOSS community to confront it. What is the FOSS community's definition of success? Mark stated his definition above. The question is if enough members of the FOSS community agree and will join him.
Posted May 18, 2011 15:49 UTC (Wed)
by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
[Link] (1 responses)
Point of Fact: Ubuntu jumped at the chance to support LibreOffice instead of "trusting" Oracle to play the role of good corporate shepard. For him to be critical of LibreOffice now is hypocritical.
Point of Fact: OpenStack's contributor agreement does not require copyright assignment. Eucalyptus's contributor agreement does. Another situation where Ubuntu( under Mark's leadership..leadership with veto power) has chosen to support the project that does not use copyright assignment to shim up its business plan.
Mark can talk and talk and talk about how important copyright assignment is to correctly leverage business interests to take open development to a new level. That sure sounds nice. And I bet when you hear him talk in person, his personal charisma really makes it a compelling argument.
But, look at the track record for Canonical and Ubuntu with regard to how they chose to interact with companies that are doing exactly what Mark says is needed. They shun them. Given the first opportunity they'll jump to supporting a competing codebase that does not require assignment.
This is classic "do as I say not as I do" podium posturing. If Mark, with his very strong beliefs on the matter, can't seem to drag Ubuntu into a direction to "trust" Oracle or Eucalyptus when given the choice between those corporate, copyright assignment requiring entities, and competitors with more community oriented contributor agreements which do not assign copyrights...then why on Earth would Mark expect anyone to pay attention to what he is saying? If he's going to talk the talk, Canonical needs to walk the walk.
-jef
Posted May 19, 2011 7:48 UTC (Thu)
by kleptog (subscriber, #1183)
[Link]
More useful would be comparing those they have accepted with those they haven't. The ones they reject, would you have accepted them? Do you think the ones they accepted are good ones? That would make it clearer whether you agree with his goal or not.
I'm still more stuck on the practical sides. I really hope we don't get contributor agreement proliferation, because that would be even worse than licence proliferation.
Posted May 18, 2011 16:15 UTC (Wed)
by southey (guest, #9466)
[Link]
Rather people are concerned about freedom of their code as evident by the many different licenses. So it is easy to understand that contributor agreements will be used to overcome restrictions people place on their code such as moving from BSD to GPL, GPL v2 to GPL v3 etc. when it benefits the company, organization or other entity. This is likely to be important in an meritocracy where perhaps the majority of people do not support the view of the 'administration'.
Posted May 19, 2011 14:23 UTC (Thu)
by wingo (guest, #26929)
[Link]
I don't understand what all this whining is about on Shuttleworth's part about a company feeling "belittled". It's nonsensical. "Why can't I turn your contribution into something proprietary? That's childish of you!" Really. A shame, because Shuttleworth is in a position to do a lot of good.
Posted May 20, 2011 18:26 UTC (Fri)
by jberkus (guest, #55561)
[Link]
For that matter, PostgreSQL, a project which he holds up as an example, does not require any copyright assignment. MySQL, which did require copyright assignment, was legendary for lack of external contributions and for playing fast-and-loose with licensing. So he's defeating his own arguments.
I think that Mark has an argument here, but this interview completely fails to express it effectively.
Posted May 20, 2011 21:37 UTC (Fri)
by hingo (guest, #14792)
[Link]
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
> illegal and all) is analogous to "a small simple patch". Or did you mean
> "potted plant"?
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
> recording so I can hear the quoted phrases in context.
> phrases, and not much reasoned or rational thinking.
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
LWN isn't lay press -- their coverage is too specialized.
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
I struggled a bit with this one during the review process and thought we had cleared it up. Here's my interpretation, which is very much third-hand and could be wrong, bear that in mind.
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
> around what Mark said here
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
then $nice_guy in $company is laid off or reprimanded by $bad_guy, or $company gets bought out by $idiot_company. lots of time is wasted, lots of promises are broken, lots of porcelain is smashed.
copyright assignment can work well with $company. but a whole body of IP under one copyright will give $idiot_company funny ideas.
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
If Mr. Shuttleworth thinks otherwise, _he_ is being ignorant of how the real world works. But I find it difficult to believe that such a fool could have become as rich as Mark Shuttleworth is.
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Wol
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Wol
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Learning, observing and experimenting is essential for training the next generation of developers who build on the experience of the last, solving new problems.
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
MySQL and PostgreSQL are "two great free software databases", which have companies behind their development or providing support.
This seems to be a poor example for the case Mark is trying to make. Postgresql is an outstanding F/OSS database with no requirement for making a copyright assignment whatsoever. And MySQL is in possibly its worst position in a long time because its copyright assignment centralized control over the codebase such that it could simply be bought (first by Sun, and then subsequently) by Oracle, one of its major proprietary competitors. This acquisition triggered a number of forks precisely because of concerns over Oracle's control.
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Yep. MySQL used copyright assignment to build a company and employ people. Other people used different employment strategies and no copyright assignment to build a community around Postgres. Because of the centralized control of the copyright for MySQL, the project was bought outright by a proprietary competitor. The MySQL community now seems to be in disarray. The Postgres community seems to be moving happily forward together.
MySQL, Postgres and copyright assignment
MySQL, Postgres and copyright assignment
MySQL, Postgres and copyright assignment
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
My understanding is that the largest group (or, at least, a large group) of OpenOffice.org developers who weren't willing to assign changes to Sun (and later Oracle) were motivated not so much for "fundamentalist" reasons as for business reasons: they worked for Novell, and Novell didn't want to sign a one-sided agreement. Hence the Novell fork of OO.o.
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
And do other corporate entities do this sort of tech laypress sponsorship to their equivalent events? Google? Apple? Red Hat? I don't know I'm asking. For all I know this is common practice across the industry and if it is, well I think the entire industry probably needs to be more upfront about it...so readership can take sponsorship into account when applying their bias filters.
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
> to their equivalent events?
> choice of quotes.
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
We travel to a lot of conferences with assistance from the events involved. Do you really think that, over the last year, we could have reported from events in Germany, Japan, Brazil, Australia, England, Hungary, etc. without it? We have a long-term goal of being able to pay more of our own travel, but it's a hard one to hit.
Sponsorship
Sponsorship
FWIW, I never apply to a conference as a "journo" - I apply as a member of the community. I have never really seen how the decisions are made, but I believe conference organizers apply the same approach to us as to anybody else: how much will the event be improved by our presence?
Sponsorship
Sponsorship
Sponsorship
Sponsorship
> by a journo who is most assuredly in the Ubuntu camp
Sponsorship
Sponsorship
> the answer
Sponsorship
Sponsorship
Sponsorship
Sponsorship
Sponsorship
Sponsorship
http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/02/01/copyright-not-all-eq...
Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have
get hammered for what they haven't opened yet rather than thanked for
what they have opened is a serious problem"
Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have
Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have
Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have
Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have
Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have
Hi,
Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have
I've witnessed numerous cases where companies start to open something and have people attacking them publicly
Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have
Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have
Dave.
Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have
Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have
> able to use the numerous wide-reaching patents over which we will
> eventually sue you'. As catches go, a massive lawsuit probably counts as
> quite a big one.
Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have
Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have
>> freedom
> Do you have any justification for this rather extraordinary assertion?
Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have
Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have
> dictator (patent owner), how can you call that software free? It fails the
> first rule of software freedom.
Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have
patents? That seems implausible.
It seems plausible to me. There are so many of them, so vague and so broad. And software contains so many parts that might infringe. It seems unlikely that there would be no overlap, for any program that does anything useful.
Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have
Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have
Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have
Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have
Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have
Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have
> is actually found to infringe a patent.
Dave.
Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have
Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have
Evidence or urban legend - "problems" companies have
Wol
Evidence - "problems" companies have
Evidence - "problems" companies have
Sponsorship
Sponsorship
Sponsorship
Google and Facebook spend money on FOSS to support their operations, but they don't directly make money from FOSS.
Sponsorship
Sponsorship
> desktop-project-specific events) because we've always figured that
> somebody from an opposing camp would complain. We can't possibly attend
> every distribution's conference, so we normally attend none. Perhaps we
> need to stick to that in the future.
Sponsorship
Sponsorship
Sponsorship
And again, I'll re-iterate...
Sponsorship
Sponsorship
Sponsorship
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Owning copyright gives you only one kind of revenue-generating power. All other ways to generate revenue do not require copyright ownership.
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
One of the things journalists can do is interview people that most of us wouldn't get a chance to talk to very often. I like it. Thanks!
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
I myself would be willing to drop a few dollars here and there from time to time to support FLOSS projects, but there doesn't seem to be any easy opportunity.
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
How to donate to free software projects
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
-- without much spare time;
-- with a fair amount of disposable income.
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Projects and managing their donations
Projects and managing their donations
Projects and managing their donations
Projects and managing their donations
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
With friends like that who need enemies ?
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
I don't mind if a company sell maintenance or services (as in writing new code on demand for a fee) based on my code... but I _do_ mind that it does that under closed-source... that is why I use GPL and not BSD
In other word I don't mind that they make money so long as I at least get better/more code in return.
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
I don't understand. why bother with the later then ? what's the benefit ?
But I think that Copyright assignment is an overkill to achieve this goal... although I am unsure of how to have the licensed worded to _guarantee_ that outcome (i.e not just hoping that the 'company' will do the 'Right Thing(tm)')
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Interpretation of the GPL. The GPL allows to charge for "support" and "the cost of physically transferring a copy". It does not forbid donations.
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Code freedom
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
So is the reason Mark is failing to make this case, because he is not making any sense?
Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software