Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software

Posted May 17, 2011 20:25 UTC (Tue) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183)
In reply to: Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software by andrel
Parent article: Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software

Yes, you're not going to get any disagreement from me about that. Just when I thought we'd gotten through the licence proliferation and gotten legal to understand the common licences, we're now confronted with a proliferation of contributor agreements.

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.

Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software

Posted May 17, 2011 20:40 UTC (Tue) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (11 responses)

When a company envisions proprietary relicensing as a business model for themselves and doesn't want to compete with other contributors to the codebase in a proprietary relicensing business landscape that company will chose an (A/L)GPL licensing model with copyright assignment to keep other entities for competing for the same business on equal terms.

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

Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software

Posted May 17, 2011 21:54 UTC (Tue) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link] (10 responses)

Now we're conflating two issues: contributor agreement != copyright assignment. I was considering the case where if a project is GPL and one person/company owns 95% of the code base, then requiring contributions to be BSD doesn't appear to have any benefits over copyright assignment.

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?

Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software

Posted May 17, 2011 22:16 UTC (Tue) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (9 responses)

If you personally don't have a problem with assigning your copyrights over to a single for-profit entity... then feel free to do that.

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

Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software

Posted May 18, 2011 0:43 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (8 responses)

Jef,

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.

Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software

Posted May 18, 2011 1:00 UTC (Wed) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (7 responses)

Again.. talking about assignment without also talking about the license in use is not enough. BSD/MIT/Apache with assignment is a totally different situation than GPL with assignment. Assignment coupled with an automatically "business-friendly" proprietary permissive license is still a level playing field for all contributors. Everyone gets the ability to make a proprietary fork..to take their copy of the ball and go home..any time they want.

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

Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software

Posted May 18, 2011 1:14 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (6 responses)

I actually haven't seen a contributer agreement that would prohibit you (the code author) from using the code for anything else (or contributing it to another organization). If there is such an agreement, I would oppose it.

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.

Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software

Posted May 18, 2011 2:00 UTC (Wed) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link] (5 responses)

Well, there's one rather significant purpose for which a license back is no use: contributing the same code to another project that also requires copyright assignment.

Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software

Posted May 18, 2011 2:07 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (4 responses)

good point.

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.

Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software

Posted May 18, 2011 3:13 UTC (Wed) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (3 responses)

Right! The devil is in the details. Again I'll point out that Canonical's chosen form of contributor agreement doesn't not provide for dual-ownership or any such nuance. It's a blanket assignment. It's really difficult to take Shuttleworth seriously when Canonical's own assignment requirements are don't consider the complexity of a world where multiple projects are expecting ownership over potentially the same pieces of code that a contributor could be submitting across projects.

-jef

Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software

Posted May 18, 2011 3:34 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (2 responses)

The good news is that Mark recognizes that there are problems with their current agreement. Per the article, he considers it "mediocre at best" so there's hope in getting a good one eventually.

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.

Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software

Posted May 18, 2011 4:16 UTC (Wed) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (1 responses)

He also admitted he's failed to show leadership in making the case for assignment in public. I would not call the closed door nature of Harmony discussions under Chatham House rules "evidence" of progress at all.

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

Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software

Posted May 25, 2011 10:26 UTC (Wed) by markshuttle (guest, #22379) [Link]

The meetings were an open invitation, lots of people both for and against CLA's were present or represented. They were not "closed door" in any sense. Chatham House Rules are a very good device for encouraging people to speak their minds without fear of attribution, and the best way to make progress on complicated discussions when there are inflammatory topics on the table.

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.

Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software

Posted May 17, 2011 20:51 UTC (Tue) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

Copyright assignment restricts the ability to market closed derivatives to the original upstream, while BSD would let anyone do it.

Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software

Posted May 18, 2011 8:05 UTC (Wed) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link]

> That said, what does a good contributor agreement give you (or anybody) that requiring all contributions to be BSD licensed doesn't.

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.