LWN: Comments on "Community contributions and copyright assignment"

Beer?

rstanley — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 23:45:16 +0000

There are two descriptions of American Beer (Lager) that I will always remember. Both are quoted from Brits:

"Gassed up weasel water!" (Unknown London resident)

"American beer is like making love in a canoe! It's f%$#*&g close to water!" (Monty Python) ;^)

Fortunately, there are a large number of Micro Breweries here in the US that DO know what real Beer/Ale/Bitter/Porter/etc... are.

Determining what country produces the best beer is not only very subjective, but such an ongoing process, that the final answer may never be known! ;^)

Community contributions and copyright assignment

nix — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:37:27 +0000

A lot of people worked on XFree. It's true that Keith did an awful lot,
but so did a lot of other people.

(He *had* been around in the X world forever, though, since 1989 I think.
Of course Jim Gettys had been around longer but Jim's been around longer
than *anyone*, pretty much.)

Advice appreciated on community contributions approach

Wol — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:23:49 +0000

I've been thinking what I'd do.

I suspect I'd settle for "you give me the right to exempt people from the requirement to provide source, provided the binaries are unmodified".

That way, I could licence commercial companies to sell a binary-only, "proprietary" product, but they would lose the right to make proprietary changes. If they wanted to change the source, they would have to give their changes to me for me to make them freely available, in order to be able to distribute their changes.

Cheers,
Wol

Beer?

Wol — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:18:57 +0000

What about PROPER English ale?

The reason Brits drink warm beer is that you can actually TASTE the stuff. Most american beer is served chilled, so it anaesthetises the mouth so you can't taste the (lack of) flavour.

Cheers,
Wol

Community contributions and copyright assignment

Wol — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:17:02 +0000

And the guy who started x.org was the guy who'd actually done 90% of the work on XFree - he just got fed up with leadership being all mouth and no trousers. The change of licence was the last straw.

Cheers,
Wol

Community contributions and copyright assignment

liljencrantz — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 09:21:49 +0000

That hardly seems optimal to me. I'd _much_ rather see a revised copyright assignment policy from Canonical, and I don't think that is out of the question.

Community contributions and copyright assignment

dkg — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 15:25:27 +0000

but both a and b, as far as i can tell from what you've written, are asking for copyright licenses, not copyright assignment.

That is, with (a) you're asking your contributors for the right to use, modify, and redistribute their code under the same terms that you've offered them for your code. no one is going to balk at that if they're sending you patches already.

and with (b), you seem to again be asking for a *license*, not an assignment. Canonical (according to the article) is actually asking contributors to sign over the proprietorship of the code itself, along with a broad patent grant, all for the privilege of having the code included in their version of the tools.

i think that's a different deal.

Beer in Spain

man_ls — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 07:29:11 +0000

Spain is not usually associated with good beer, but we have some pretty strong brands. After I've been abroad and enjoyed multiple varieties, I always come back to my Mahou with delight (and a bit of surprise that it is still the best I've tasted). Ambar from Zaragoza is also very good -- their latest International Expo (dedicated to water) ads said "you will come for the water, you will return for the beer". San Miguel sells very well abroad and it is not bad.

As to keg beer, in most of Andalucía they tend to serve a disgusting yellowish stuff, beware; but in the center (esp. Madrid) you will see in most bars a lot of glasses filled with the most delicious golden liquid. It tastes even better than it looks.

In short, I hope that if our editor ever comes here (or has already) he will get a fair sampling of our goods, so that we get a fair place in the competition.

Community contributions and copyright assignment

frazier — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 05:03:56 +0000

The push back works sometimes. I think we all remember the QT license bit where there was the GPL/commercial split. Nokia came in and solved that with LGPL licensing, and there was incentive for them to make the change with chunks of the community using other software with fairer licensing.

Community contributions and copyright assignment

zooko — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 01:55:59 +0000

I wonder about one thing though: you mentioned some people who were uncomfortable with this situation, and I believe you that you really talked to such people over beer. But aren't some other people perfectly happy to contribute to a codebase which might be additionally relicensed under a proprietary licence?

Whenever people contribute work to my project -- Tahoe-LAFS -- I ask them (a) can we please have it under the same terms that we distribute Tahoe-LAFS under (which are Free Software and Open Source), and (b) can we please also have a license to use it however we wish including proprietary relicensing. Also I tell them that we will immediately release their contributions under our Free Software/Open Source licensing terms as soon as their contributions hit our revision control repository.

Everybody so far has said yes to (a) and all but two contributors so far have said yes to (b).

Just send in a patch ...

giraffedata — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 23:45:04 +0000

It would be stupid of them to refuse to accept it since much of what they are working with is already under the GPL.

I believe the article says refuse to accept it is exactly what Canonical will do, stupid or not. And it mentions a few reasons that it might not be stupid. It would be a waste of time to send in a patch to someone who has made it clear he won't use code to which you hold the copyright.

And FSF has been rejecting code like that forever too.

Beer?

JoeF — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 18:53:34 +0000

Most of the stuff sold as beer in the US is pretty much colored water.
As somebody who grew up in Europe, I would put Germany, Belgium, and the Czech Republic in the top three, in no particular order.

Community contributions and copyright assignment

lysse — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 18:18:30 +0000

> I enjoy a working environment where the word 'team' is uttered in derision

Are they hiring?

Irrelevant argument

southey — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:49:42 +0000

The person has knowingly given Canonical ownership of the code. There is nothing in the agreement to keep the code non-free nor to keep the author's intentions. So Canonical can do what it likes with it.

Community contributions and copyright assignment

pjones — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:39:15 +0000

That's not as optimal as you might think. For one thing, we'd rather James kept working on it, whereas with X.org there was a bit more of a line in the sand.

Beer?

corbet — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:18:34 +0000

Results are fuzzy, and my notes are incomplete. It seems that more research will be required...

Beer?

Trou.fr — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:59:01 +0000

Belgium, by far (if you like tasty and strong beers).

Advice appreciated on community contributions approach

kripkenstein — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 12:58:27 +0000

I am sure that is possible, at least in theory, but it might have practical issues.

For example, if you want to relicense a few years later, and can't get ahold of all the original contributors to pay them, that would be problematic. Or if something happened to them you need to find their next of kin.

Maybe it could work in this way: If you relicense, you need to publicly advertise that fact, and the authors then have the option to contact you for $X within 1 year from the announcement.

Not sure how I feel about that approach, though. For one thing, would it be $X per contributor? Then 1,000 lines of patches are the same as 1? Or is it by lines of code? Seems troubling either way.

Advice appreciated on community contributions approach

sandmann — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 12:22:49 +0000

Would it be possible to come up with a scheme where contributors were compensated if the code were ever to be relicensed commercially?

Ie., have them sign something that said "you can relicense it, but you'll have to pay $x to J. Hacker".

I see no problems

tzafrir — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 10:51:06 +0000

How about European projects such as QT and MySQL? How does a similar agreement work for them?

Community contributions and copyright assignment

intgr — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 10:46:47 +0000

I think that is what user ewan suggested and I entirely agree with it. Other distributions should make a fork that Canonical cannot make use of. If the patches contributed to this fork are significant enough, it might end up convincing Canonical to drop the copyright assignment.

Just send in a patch ...

addw — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 10:45:54 +0000

and alongside it include a note saying that the patch is copyright you and that you release it under the GPL. If/when canonical come back asking you to sign their agreement - just refuse and point out that your patch already has a perfectly good license. It is then up to them to accept the patch or not.

It would be stupid of them to refuse to accept it since much of what they are working with is already under the GPL.

I see no problems

cate — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 10:36:30 +0000

I don't agree (IANAL). The purpose and the intention are important. And no,
you cannot give the *all* usages. (see the curt rules about moral rights)

For a usual software job the usage of a work is nearly clear; but OTOH I'm
pretty sure that if my employer will use my code for malware (and it was
not a scope of my code and my company), I can block it (I'm in every case
the author of the code, so my reputation could suffer).

I've some more doubts with the change from free to proprietary license.

But if I'm active in free software movement (code and philosophy), if I'm
know n to be a "purist" and I contribute to a free software (maybe Upload),
my reputation will suffer with a proprietary change in license, whenever
the Canonical agreement I signed (the program is clear marked as free
software, and there is nothing so explicit about turning in a proprietary
software). This is an extreme, but IMHO it is also valid (with some more
doubts) to usual developers.

Anyway IANAL

I see no problems

johill — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 10:14:54 +0000

The author's intentions don't matter -- the agreement will surely include a clause that hands over all _usage_ rights of the code, iow. the moral authorship right doesn't matter.

This is how coding/etc. for money works in Europe too -- you retain your moral rights, but your employer gets _all_ usage rights, which typically includes taking those right away from you so that while you can still claim authorship of the code, you cannot use it in any way.

I see no problems

cate — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 09:23:02 +0000

Yes, but in a collaborative project it is enough to have some "European"
developers to block proprietary changes. And fortunately this block is valid
in all the world.

I see no problems

amikins — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 09:13:18 +0000

In other portions of the world (US in particular) Canonical's agreement is
actually as problematic as our editor explains. Europe's concept of 'moral
rights' does not exist in the US, and is not a dominant concept throughout
the world (although it does show up in other areas if I remember correctly).

Advice appreciated on community contributions approach

kripkenstein — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 09:09:41 +0000

Thanks, I wasn't aware of Drizzle's interesting contributions approach. I will consider adopting it. (But maybe with AGPL/Apache as opposed to Drizzle's GPL/BSD? Need to think about it.)

I see no problems

cate — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 09:02:45 +0000

I really see no problems.

AFAIK (IANAL) the moral right cannot be assigned/transferred, and AFAIK using
a software in a non-free manner could violate the author intentions about the
code. IMHO the Canonical agreement is too weak to imply proprietary license,
and a simple "This is free software" on every file (as it is in normal use)
clear the author intentions.

Thus: IMO Canonical cannot distribute a non-free version of Upstream.

PS: This is probably a lot European-centric, but considering that a lot of
developers write software in Europe, it is a good deterrent to bad things.

Advice appreciated on community contributions approach

rahulsundaram — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 08:34:14 +0000

Dual licensing is rather problematic both from the community perspective as well as a business arrangement. Over time, even projects like MySQL have been getting more revenue from traditional support and services as opposed to selling proprietary licenses. Trolltech changed from GPL to LGPL for Qt as well. What happens if there is a very good piece of AGPL licensed code that the author is unwilling to submit to you under your copyright license agreement?

Why not just require that all contributions must be permissively licensed and skip everything else. IIUC, that's what drizzle, a fork of MySQL does and it seems they are very successful is getting community contributors compared to MySQL.

Advice appreciated on community contributions approach

kripkenstein — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 06:52:48 +0000

Interesting article, and coincidentally relevant to a project of mine. I won't spam you with a link, but here is the approach I am considering doing, I would appreciate comments:

1. My own code in this project is AGPL.
2. The project bundles some other pre-existing libraries, with compatible licenses, like zlib, Apache, etc.
3. For contributions, I let people either (a) submit it under a compatible license like Apache, in which case they hold sole copyright, or (b) submit it as AGPL, with joint copyright assignment, allowing me to relicense it.

In other words, I am already bundling code with compatible licenses in this project, and people submitting new code under a compatible license is basically like more such code. Or, if they aren't comfortable with a permissive license like Apache or zlib, they can use the AGPL, but then I guess they need to trust me regarding other licenses I use it for.

Does this seem like a fair arrangement? Also, is any project already doing something like this (I can't seem to think of one)? I hope there isn't some fatal flaw I am missing.

Community contributions and copyright assignment

dkite — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 03:36:45 +0000

Being a curmudgeon, something irked me about Ubuntu and it's message. I
thought it was me.

Now I see that the emphasis on community instead of community being a result
stems from seeing the contributors as a resource to be managed.

I enjoy a working environment where the word 'team' is uttered in derision,
and view the process of team or community as a result of mutual respect and
enlightened self interest as opposed to a management method where fuzzy
feelings are elicited to get the benefits and delegate the blame.

I'm pleased to see the push back here.

Derek

Beer?

frazier — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 03:02:12 +0000

...and about the beer? I was in Germany recently and it was most obvious that their average beer was far superior to the average beer in the U.S., but what I couldn't determine was who had the best beer, or if such a determination is even possible.

Community contributions and copyright assignment

mchehab — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 02:57:47 +0000

> It seems to me that the optimal outcome for upstart would be an x.org
> style fork

I suspect that the terms of the "contributors agreement" will work, in practice, as a non-GPL license, provided that all contributors to upstart sign it.

For example, imagining that a forked version is created, while the original upstart keeps under GPL, it will be possible for the forked versions to get patches from the official upstart version.

However, as Canonical developers are bound to the agreement, they cannot get the patches from the forked version back to their version without violating the agreement, since they cannot transfer the copyrights from someone else to Canonical, nor give the additional rights that the "contributor agreement" requests.

So, a GPL patch from someone that doesn't sign the agreement is incompatible with their license.

Community contributions and copyright assignment

ewan — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:16:19 +0000

It seems to me that the optimal outcome for upstart would be an x.org style fork, with the other distributions agreeing on a common base and leaving Ubuntu behind. That would be even simpler than the x.org case so long as Canonical release their changes under the GPL since it would still be possible to include them in the fork as well as changes from other sources.

Covenant back

BrucePerens — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 21:26:12 +0000

FSF has a clear covenant back to the contributor. That's what is lacking from the other agreements.

The covenant that I am using for a project I'm working on promises to continue to release our development under an Open Source license for a period of two years, or to remove the contribution from the work. It doesn't mention commercial licenses, we have the right to issue them or not. It applies to our assigns (any company we sell the asset to).

You have to give people a reason to make the assignment, something more than "we'll put it in our maintained source tree which we might make entirely proprietary tomorrow."

Community contributions and copyright assignment

jospoortvliet — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 21:23:29 +0000

I kind-a share your sentiment. Let's hope it's true and they solve this
issue shortly... A bit publicity, like this article, will certainly help
:D

That's why I really appreciate Corbet's articles on this and similar
issues - and he does it with style :D

Community contributions and copyright assignment

ncm — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 20:51:24 +0000

Evidently the Ubuntu version of udev is straight GPL, until they change it.

[OT] SugarCRM

AlexHudson — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 20:02:03 +0000

Wow, their patent contribution stuff should have people running for the hills:

"You assign all right[s ..] in all patents, inventions copyrights and related moral rights ("IP Rights") [..] to SugarCRM[. ..] SugarCRM grants to you a non-exclusive [..] license to [..] Your Contributions[..]"

So, if you hold a patent which touches some SugarCRM contribution you make, you lose the patent and any rights to use it outside those SugarCRM contributions.

I'm not going to defend software patents for one second, but that's a pretty spectacular agreement if they think people will sign up for that.

But then you can probably count community contributions to SugarCRM on the fingers of one hand (I've tried).

Community contributions and copyright assignment

danpb — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 18:27:43 +0000

When an organization wants community contributors to signed a copyright assignment, the question is not simply whether they are expected to do the right thing wrt the community. It is about what might happen to them in the future, in particular public companies are susceptible to corporate takeovers, and privately held companies may sell out to someone else.

Although both MySQL and VirtualBox were already selling code under closed-source licenses before acquisition, the rapid change in ownership to Sun, and then Oracle, nicely highlights how your work can end up in the hands of unexpected players whom you might well not have given copyright assignment to had they been the original owners. So pretty much the only people I'd be happy giving copyright assignment to would be independent, non-profit foundations which are safe from corporate takeovers.

Community contributions and copyright assignment

juliank — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 18:27:15 +0000

Yes, I see. The Ubuntu package simply stated in debian/copyright that the
whole of udev is licensed under the GPL; so this is a packaging bug. Thanks
for correcting me.