Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software

Posted May 25, 2011 5:00 UTC (Wed) by loftsy (guest, #75160)
In reply to: Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software by jspaleta
Parent article: Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software

If the Banshee project had a copyright assignment policy then they would be in a stronger position to negotiate revenue share with the distributions. So your example actually illustrates Mark's point precisely.

Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software

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.

Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software

Posted May 26, 2011 16:39 UTC (Thu) by loftsy (guest, #75160) [Link] (3 responses)

I'll give you a specific example to illustrate how having more control over your code gives you more flexibility over distribution. Please note I'm using an example to show a more general point - I haven't actually thought long and hard about potential Banshee business models of which I'm sure there are many.

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.

Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software

Posted May 26, 2011 16:59 UTC (Thu) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (1 responses)

Banshee's under MIT/X11. If they'd wanted to do that, they could have done.

Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software

Posted May 26, 2011 17:24 UTC (Thu) by loftsy (guest, #75160) [Link]

Heh - OK I guess you've got me there. If you license basically says "Do whatever you want with it" then you don't make much downstream control!

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.

Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software

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.

Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software

Posted May 26, 2011 8:04 UTC (Thu) by renox (guest, #23785) [Link]

> If the Banshee project had a copyright assignment policy then they would be in a stronger position to negotiate revenue share with the distributions.

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..