Multitouch support for Ubuntu 10.10

Posted Aug 18, 2010 23:40 UTC (Wed) by hppnq (guest, #14462)
In reply to: Multitouch support for Ubuntu 10.10 by bronson
Parent article: Multitouch support for Ubuntu 10.10

You seem to have missed that I apologized to anyone who was disturbed by the tone or the content of the message that was directly aimed at Jef, even though I think I have every right to question in strong words the motive of someone who keeps spoiling perfectly technical items in a way that can be accurately described with very normal nouns like "insinuations" and "noise".

This is what Jef calls, interestingly, "fair game".

I will leave it at this.

Multitouch support for Ubuntu 10.10

Posted Aug 19, 2010 0:14 UTC (Thu) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (8 responses)

Did you question my motives? I'm not sure you did. You did give a long list of projects which you claim have a copyright assignment policy similar in nature to Canonical's. I've been attempting to do my due diligence by reading over the contributor license agreements for those projects to confirm your assertions that they do have blanket copyright assignment clauses embedded in them. I'm having trouble finding them in some cases.

For example JBoss requires a contributor agreement for many of the projects under the JBoss umbrella. But I cannot find the clause in it which states that you are required to assign copyright to another entity.

For example JBoss Web requires in-part:
"You hereby grant to Red Hat, its successors, and assigns, the non-exclusive, transferable, irrevocable, perpetual, royalty-free right to use, modify, copy, sell, and distribute the Contributions under the terms of any version of the GNU General Public License, or any version of the GNU Lesser General Public License. Without limitation, this grant is made with respect to any copyright, patent, or other intellectual property or moral rights You may have in or to the Contributions."

That is a very narrowly worded licensing clause which does not give Red Hat the copyright control necessary to re-license a contribution under a proprietary license. Its important to understand the difference between this sort of language...language that prevents proprietary exploitation of contributed work...and a blanket copyright assignment which allows a central authority to create proprietary licensed version of contributed code. The option to re-license code under later version of the GPL and LGPL is a universe away from a blanket copyright assignment which would allow a central for-profit entity to re-license contributions however it desires. If Canonical used similar narrow language such as that found in JBoss Web's CLA there wouldn't be much of an issue.

-jef

Multitouch support for Ubuntu 10.10

Posted Aug 19, 2010 10:21 UTC (Thu) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link] (7 responses)

Did you question my motives? I'm not sure you did.

Oh, I did. Really. Still do.

You did give a long list of projects which you claim have a copyright assignment policy similar in nature to Canonical's.

The topic of copyright assignment has been chewed to death for years. I gave a list of projects that you could study to see how they employ copyright assignment. Your due diligence should have made it clear to you that all these policies are different, that all these projects and companies -- and there are many more -- have their own different reasons for requiring contributors to enter into a special agreement regarding the intellectual property of the code, and that the results differ wildly.

It should have made it clear that there is no particular reason to single out the multitouch libraries in the long list of actual, popular and possibly heavily integrated chunks of software that are perhaps also running on your system right now, to make people aware of the risks of copyright assignment in general, or this one in particular.

Am I correct in thinking that, with all those announcements of new releases of, say, Evolution, not once did you chime in to warn people about the dangers of assigning copyrights to Novell? Are you surprised that I find this strange and therefore question your motives for spreading this "helpful information", especially since Novell's track record can't have escaped you?

Now, JBoss, indeed, is a bit different story. The agreement you need to enter does not require you to transfer copyrights, it only wants to make sure the license remains a (L)GPL one. Oh, and all the files have to include a JBoss, Inc. copyright notice. Fair enough, no? Especially considering the JBoss, Inc business model. Red Hat bought JBoss, Inc and the community, no copyright assignment needed. It worked out quite successful for them, a prime example of how community resources can be used to maximize corporate profits.

Multitouch support for Ubuntu 10.10

Posted Aug 19, 2010 10:35 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (4 responses)

"Have to" is very different from "should". It is merely a template as shown by the wording

"All files (including tests) should have a header like the following:"

It is merely sound legal practise to have a project name listed and a per file copyright notice giving you all the rights under GPL or LGPL as applicable.

Multitouch support for Ubuntu 10.10

Posted Aug 19, 2010 13:38 UTC (Thu) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link] (3 responses)

"Have to" is very different from "should". It is merely a template

Actually, I have checked quite a big handful of JBoss files and got a 100% score before I got bored: this template seems to be an awfully popular actual copyright notice.

It is merely sound legal practise to have a project name listed and a per file copyright notice giving you all the rights under GPL or LGPL as applicable.

To me it does not sound like a great idea, legally speaking, to put "Copyright EvilCorp" at the top of my file and relegate myself to @authors.

Multitouch support for Ubuntu 10.10

Posted Aug 19, 2010 13:57 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (2 responses)

A popular notice isn't equivalent to a mandate and unless you sign a agreement to give your copyright to a corporation, authors retain their copyright. It is not possible for a mere template to change that.

Multitouch support for Ubuntu 10.10

Posted Aug 20, 2010 8:40 UTC (Fri) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link] (1 responses)

No one is refuting that. The JBoss story is about the "myth of Open Source".

Multitouch support for Ubuntu 10.10

Posted Aug 20, 2010 9:24 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

The topic of the thread was copyright assignment and the article you reference doesn't seem related. Although only tangentially related, If you are talking about the differing business models, JBoss's original model created by Marc (who is no longer with Red Hat) was to employ all the major contributors and Red Hat doesn't have a mandate to do that anymore after the acquisition. So perhaps it is relevant as a historical note but I am not sure of the point you are trying to make.

Multitouch support for Ubuntu 10.10

Posted Aug 19, 2010 18:16 UTC (Thu) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (1 responses)

Evolution is a very interesting example as a piece of history of a corporate entity coming to understand that blanket copyright assignment is a suboptimal way to build a vibrant contributor community around a codebase.

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2008-Ju...

A post made ironically enough on the same day I started posting on LWN. Difficult to argue that I missed a chance to lobby against Novell's copyright assignment policy on Evolution in commentary here when they decided to stop requiring about the same time I can to LWN. Maybe part of the reason they changed their policy was fear of my yet to be written scathing commentary of their policy.

Regardless of the reason, the history of evolution's change from a copyright assignment policy is a good lesson for Canonical to learn from for _all_ the codebases it requires copyright assignment for...a growing list of convenience libraries not limited to just this new multi-touch stack. It's a systemic problem in how Canonical approaches new development efforts.

-jef

Multitouch support for Ubuntu 10.10

Posted Aug 20, 2010 9:38 UTC (Fri) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link]

Wow, it feels like much longer.

Obviously, you're not going to humour me, so I took some time to investigate. How could you miss this opportunity for instance? That's a very enlightening comment.

I am done now!