Project Harmony 1.0 and its discontents

[Posted July 7, 2011 by corbet]

The Harmony Project (an effort to create a standardized set of contributor agreements last covered here in April) has launched version 1.0 of its agreements. There is a cute selection tool allowing projects to pick the agreement which best suits their wishes. It's not clear how the agreements have changed since the first public disclosure in April.

Harmony remains controversial; see these responses by Bradley Kuhn, Richard Fontana, and Dave Neary. Quoting Richard: "Despite my admiration, respect and affection for those who have been driving Harmony, I cannot endorse the product of their work. I believe Harmony is unnecessary, confusing, and potentially hazardous to open source and free software development."

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Project Harmony 1.0 and its discontents

Posted Jul 7, 2011 12:31 UTC (Thu) by dneary (guest, #55185) [Link] (8 responses)

Well, I wouldn't call myself a discontent... Harmony are good copyright assignment agreements as far as they go; my only problem with them is that they make it harder to create a developer community, and as an initiative the project could encourage the adoption of CLAs where they wouldn't be useful.

Does that make me a discontent?

Dave.

Project Harmony 1.0 and its discontents

Posted Jul 7, 2011 13:50 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes. It does.

Project Harmony 1.0 and its discontents

Posted Jul 7, 2011 16:24 UTC (Thu) by dneary (guest, #55185) [Link]

Oh.

Well, that's alright then.

Project Harmony 1.0 and its discontents

Posted Jul 7, 2011 13:55 UTC (Thu) by bkuhn (subscriber, #58642) [Link] (5 responses)

I think I am probably a discontent myself on the issue, so it adequately describes me. It's really been Fontana's articulations of the inbound=outbound issue and why it's central to software freedom culture that have pushed me in that direction over the years.

Project Harmony 1.0 and its discontents

Posted Jul 7, 2011 18:45 UTC (Thu) by rfontana (subscriber, #52677) [Link] (4 responses)

In the original work by Freud, _Civilization and its Discontents_, didn't the "discontents" refer to something more abstract than discontented people? I think you told me you've actually read that book, Bradley; I certainly haven't. :)

Wikipedia tells me that the original German title was _Das Unbehagen in der Kultur_ which apparently translates to "The Uneasiness in Culture".

Project Harmony 1.0 and its discontents

Posted Jul 7, 2011 19:31 UTC (Thu) by bkuhn (subscriber, #58642) [Link] (3 responses)

Yeah, I've read it, but it was in 1993. ISTR discontents referred to the mental pain and anguish daily life oppressed upon the middle class because they must resist their baser needs and desires. Reading over my class notes from the time seem to indicate that's correct. (Yes, I still have them.)

Project Harmony 1.0 and its discontents

Posted Jul 7, 2011 20:23 UTC (Thu) by rfontana (subscriber, #52677) [Link] (2 responses)

The fact that you have your 1993 class notes handy can only be described as disturbing.

Project Harmony 1.0 and its discontents

Posted Jul 8, 2011 4:57 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (1 responses)

Why do I always get the image in my head of you two doing an Abbet and Costello inspired Vaudeville route to an audience of cruise ship retirees every time I see you reach for the catch phrase?

-jef

GNU/Abbott-and-Costello

Posted Jul 8, 2011 6:33 UTC (Fri) by louie (guest, #3285) [Link]

Now I'm not going to be able to get that image out of my head.

Project Harmony 1.0 and its discontents

Posted Jul 8, 2011 21:01 UTC (Fri) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link] (1 responses)

I'm merely discontented because, by my count, this is the third unique project named "Harmony" in this community.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmony_(toolkit)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Harmony

Can we retire this name somehow?

Project Harmony 1.0 and its discontents

Posted Jan 10, 2012 21:50 UTC (Tue) by roelofs (guest, #2599) [Link]

Can we retire this name somehow?

A-freaking-men! (So to speak.)

Greg