LWN: Comments on "Ubuntu developer summit"

Ubuntu developer summit

slashdot — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 21:01:47 +0000

So, basically, Mr. Shuttleworth wants contributor agreements so that companies can make money selling proprietary software containing code contributed to them for free?

Well, I think there is a clear way to answer that: raising your middle finger.

Not all contributor agreements are created equal

jospoortvliet — Sat, 21 May 2011 16:51:59 +0000

Even then, saying "oh, your contribution is not substantial, so give the code to me or I won't take it" simply doesn't seem friendly...

Not all contributor agreements are created equal

job — Mon, 16 May 2011 20:39:23 +0000

Requiring copyright transfer is a good way of making sure you only receive trivial patches.

Ubuntu developer summit

jspaleta — Fri, 13 May 2011 15:59:21 +0000

So has anyone actually taken them up on that yet?

They can certainly _try_ to make a business out of that, but my point is perhaps its not actually a viable business.

-jef

Ubuntu developer summit

juliank — Fri, 13 May 2011 13:30:51 +0000

> Bzr as a proprietary re-licensed thing?

See http://wiki.bazaar.canonical.com/BzrFeatures:
>> To embed Bazaar into products under a different
>> license, please contact Canonical with your needs.

Proprietary software and your open source contributions

jspaleta — Fri, 13 May 2011 06:44:04 +0000

Mark knows that contributor agreements can be crafted with language which would act as a binding promise-back which would constrain Canonical or any copyright holder Canonical sold copyrights to from using contributed code in a proprietary fashion. Its contract language, and it can be crafted. He knows this.

If Canonical really wanted to take future proprietary re-licensing off the table they could craft the language of their agreement to do exactly that.

But no, that's not what they are doing. They very much want the keep the option of proprietary relicensing open. Even if Canonical under current ownership doesn't ever use the ability to do that, the current management teams sees a long term financial benefit in keep the ability to proprietary relicense in play to entice future investment from others.

Canonical sees the ability to proprietary relicense as a strategic business benefit in the long term even if they current management doesn't have plans to actually make use of that ability. If Mark sold Canonical in a year, would you trust the new owners to not relicense? I don't see this current management team being able to put 100+ million Ubuntu systems in play in 4 years time. If that goal is going to happen, Canonical is going to get sold to another entity with a much sharp business focus. And that very well could be proprietary re-licensing of Canonical built tech.

Mark wants everyone to trust him..to trust Canonical like somehow Canonical is a personification of his personal interests. It is not. It is a for-profit entity and being such may very well end up under the control of people with very different personal interests at some point in the future. Mark has a very short memory about this important aspect of the lifecycle of corporate entities. Considering he made his big cash pile by selling his previous successful corporate venture to a much larger entity he should know full well that one of the end-games for Canonical first management team is a lucrative strategic buy-out by another management team. No contributor should make the mistake of forgetting that possible future, no matter how charismatic, charming, friendly or downright human Mark is. End-of-the-day, you aren't handing over your copyrights to the man, you are handing over your copyrights to a corporation.

-jef

Proprietary software and your open source contributions

hingo — Fri, 13 May 2011 06:01:21 +0000

I'm not worried that Canonical would create proprietary software. Sure, I wasn't worried about MySQL AB either until I realized that was exactly what the execs had been busy doing... But yes, the point is not whether to trust Mark or not.

What I see as a likely path here is that eventually Canonical is sold, and the new owner will create proprietary software. I think this is particularly likely because of the mobile device markets you are targeting. And even creating proprietary software isn't wrong in itself, but wrt the contributor agreement in particular I think it is very wrong now to advocate FOSS hackers to sign over copyrights, appealing to them trusting Mark to be a good guy, when in fact the likelihood is quite big that eventually Canonical code can be used to create proprietary software.

Not all contributor agreements are created equal

rickmoen — Fri, 13 May 2011 02:23:59 +0000

dgm wrote:

What's the point of keeping the copyright of a handful of lines of code?

You ask that as if doing so created a problem. In my experience (in the general case), it doesn't. Bugfix patches traditionally don't even include an author-credit comment line, so the codebase maintainer cannot be even said to be burdened by an overflowing credits list. So, no, it doesn't 'complicate matters for everybody'. In fact, it doesn't require anybody to do anything they're not already doing by default.

The codebase maintainer's only burden, actually, is to avoid injuring the property interests of the various copyright holders, who might otherwise sue if they can prove 'actual damages' from copyright infringement, which for all practical purposes can happen only by purporting to adopt a new licence grossly out of step with the existing one.

And that raises the more important question: Why is the codebase maintainer seeking copyright assignments? There's really only the one, obvious reason: The maintainer wants the option to use other people's property in ways they might not consent to, e.g., in proprietary forks, and wishes to avert that problem through complete ownership.

Strictly speaking, by the way, the author of a bugfix patch might not even gain copyright title at all. Copyright arises only from works with 'some minimal degree of creativity' (see Feist Publications decision). Code that is purely functional or for compatibility with existing interfaces thus might not be copyright-eligible (something only a judge could decide). More important, alleged owners of unregistered copyright over a very small contribution would seldom have much in the way of available remedies.

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

Proprietary software and your open source contributions

kiko — Fri, 13 May 2011 00:25:29 +0000

Having seen the Canonical plans inside and out from various teams within the company (and having Mark as a friend for years) I can tell you that the risk of Canonical proprietary software being created out of the community's open source contributions is pretty much zero. It's just that Mark is a bit of a neat freak. He often worries about complicated, long-term risks and likes the idea of creating process to clean up things which he considers messy. I don't know whether his contributor agreement vision is practical enough to be successful, but he has proven me wrong enough times that I usually give Mark the benefit of the doubt.

Video of Mark's speech

dowdle — Thu, 12 May 2011 14:31:44 +0000

They must have transcoded it to HTML5 because originally only the FLASH version was there... and even though I had the HTML5 trial on, it was giving me flash. Glad to see they offer another version now.

Of course the right-click, Save video as... feature just does a rickroll on you. :(

Trivial bug fixes

corbet — Thu, 12 May 2011 12:50:30 +0000

A "trivial bug fix" probably does not contain anything which is subject to copyright in the first place, so the ownership issue is moot.

Not all contributor agreements are created equal

dgm — Thu, 12 May 2011 10:56:24 +0000

indeed, I forgot to mention that the trouble is in agreeing with the meaning of "trivial".

But there's no need for project maintainers to value contributor's code. Let'em do it themselves. Offer two sets of terms under which you will accept contributions: copyright assignment (for "trivial" stuff) and copyright retention for "substantial" stuff), and let their common sense do the work. And if you feel like it, you can always retain the right to reject patches offered under the "wrong" terms.

Video of Mark's speech

pranith — Thu, 12 May 2011 10:40:26 +0000

Add &html5=True to get webM version:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjyNTCHVyxs&html5=True

Not all contributor agreements are created equal

AlexHudson — Thu, 12 May 2011 09:47:06 +0000

I roughly agree with that, but I'm not sure "lines of code" is a good metric for substantiveness. Sure, something which is around 10 lines is probably not substantial whatever it's doing (it's arguable you even have a copyright interest in something really trivial).

But on an ongoing basis, does it matter if the thing you've contributed is only 100 lines if it's doing something rather clever and really improves the software? Likewise, if you contribute twenty 10-line patches, are they insubstantial?

Trying to draw this line is why I think all contributors should be treated equally; otherwise it just becomes a divisive issue about trying to weigh the contribution people are making, and that's about as ungracious as you can get.

Not all contributor agreements are created equal

dgm — Thu, 12 May 2011 09:37:47 +0000

Yet I still think that copyright transfer makes sense in some cases. Namely, when your contribution is "trivial" (think a bug fix). What's the point of keeping the copyright of a handful of lines of code? It only serves to complicate matters for everybody (maybe that's what Marc was referring to, otherwise I cannot make sense of the plant analogy).

Substantial contributions are a complete different thing, though. I don't think that copyright assignment is a good idea in such cases, unless you truly trust the receiver.

Ubuntu developer summit

AlexHudson — Thu, 12 May 2011 08:35:47 +0000

I have a huge amount of respect for Mark, but that doesn't translate into automatically giving him latitude where I disagree with him. You'll notice I didn't personally attack *him*, I voiced disagreement with what he said.

I find that works better than name-calling. YMMV.

Ubuntu developer summit

rsidd — Thu, 12 May 2011 06:54:14 +0000

I think "donated" will turn out to be correct. I don't expect him to recover the investment, ever. I don't expect that he minds, either, so long as he stays sufficiently solvent to continue doing what he enjoys.

Ubuntu developer summit

jspaleta — Thu, 12 May 2011 06:43:30 +0000

If Canonical wanted a contributor agreement which crafted protections against misappropriation of contributed code in bad faith, they could have that. Such language is possible. The reality is Canonical specifically wants the ability to proprietary re-license as part. I simply can't fathom why.

Now I can sort of understand that if Canonical actually owned the copyrights to something significant that could be relicensed and sold as a proprietary work, But they don't. They aren't sitting on a functional codebase like mysql or a full framework like Qt. What they have are bits and pieces bolted on a larger framework they don't control over and I just don't see how anyone is going to bother paying for a proprietary licensed version of any of their in-house developed stuff.

Bzr as a proprietary re-licensed thing? Upstart as a proprietary re-licensed thing?

The utouch stuff maybe has some life in it as a proprietary relicense if they try hard enough to sell as a quick fix for touch capability in a proprietary application. More likely people are just going to route around having to purchase this tech.

I'm not even sure I see the copyrights they do own as value-add in a possible acquisition by another company. Launchpad my have value in an acquisition as a running service...but owning the copyrights isn't where the value is in that case.

-jef

Not all contributor agreements are created equal

rickmoen — Thu, 12 May 2011 05:27:25 +0000

I respect and appreciate Jono Bacon's polite but pointed reference to Canonical's problematic 'contributor agreement'. Canonical impose it for, I believe, all software projects they sponsor, including Upstart, Bazaar, etc.: It's important to realise that this is simply not the sort of licence grant normally implied by that term, as with, e.g., Apache Software Foundation's implementation of that idea.

It's not a contributor agreement at all, really. Rather, it's an outright transfer of copyright ownership, directly and categorically, from the coder to commercial firm Canonical, Ltd. Your work becomes literally their property, to do with exactly as they please, from that point forward, free of charge.

ASF, by contrast, don't insist on owning your work. Additionally, although ASF's Contributor License Agreement does give ASF broad rights, it conditions those rights on ASF never using your property 'in a way that is contrary to the public benefit or inconsistent with [ASF's] nonprofit status and bylaws in effect at the time of the Contribution'. And, as with FSF, ASF's commitment to that effect has credibility earned over a long period, which cannot be said of Canonical, Ltd., even if they made a similar commitment, which they do not.

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

Ubuntu developer summit

AndreE — Thu, 12 May 2011 03:29:34 +0000

Contributor contributions are a very complex issue, and it's a shame that the arguments are always simplied into black and white responses.

Unfortunately, Mark Shuttleworth is guilty of this too. The idea that people who don't sign over their copyright are just not being generous enough or are not willing to accept responsibility is disingenous and slightly insulting. To tackle copyright assignment, you have to address contributors' fears that their contributions to free software will be co-opted for proprietary gains. That is one of the core responsibilities of any large free software project.

Video of Mark's speech

Trelane — Thu, 12 May 2011 01:56:50 +0000

http://www.youtube.com/html5

^ to opt into the YouTube HTML5 (WebM) beta

Ubuntu developer summit

drag — Thu, 12 May 2011 00:41:57 +0000

Sorry, donated is not the right term. I meant invested.

Ubuntu developer summit

drag — Thu, 12 May 2011 00:40:43 +0000

> I wonder how many people were under the impression they were working on some kind of community park, not the backyard to Mark's house.

I wonder when people will stop insulting and twisting the words of somebody who has donated a significant amount of his personal fortune in a attempt to make Linux software friendly and easy to use.

I know nobody is going to like this, but: You should try to be a bit more kind and understanding in the future because right now you sound a lot like a dick.

Video of Mark's speech

drag — Thu, 12 May 2011 00:34:41 +0000

You did post a link to a friendly video.

When I click on that link I don't see flash, I see HTML5 webm.

Video of Mark's speech

dowdle — Wed, 11 May 2011 23:00:33 +0000

Here's a video of Mark's speech... although I know many of you prefer to read commentary about things rather than watching / listening to the original. :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjyNTCHVyxs

Sorry it is Flash on youtube. If I had found it in a more free format, I would have posted that link. I recommend communities post their videos in free formats to archive.org but so many seem to be going to commercial sites who may or may not inject ads.

Ubuntu developer summit

rahulsundaram — Wed, 11 May 2011 22:10:22 +0000

I am assuming you are talking about

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal:Licenses/CLA

It was based on Apache CLA and had some additional unneeded complexity.

FWIW, the new agreement is at

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal:Fedora_Project_Contr...

Should be straight forward and simple.

Ubuntu developer summit

dmadsen — Wed, 11 May 2011 21:14:31 +0000

Hmmm...

How about I give you a plant for your garden -- which you've made public so that anyone can enjoy it -- under the condition that you don't close your garden to the public or charge an entrance fee that some couldn't afford? Is that unreasonable?

If I'm to be REALLY generous and not have any conditions on my plant gift, perhaps I should stick a "BSD" stake in the pot?

Ubuntu developer summit

jg — Wed, 11 May 2011 21:02:27 +0000

Independent of any equity arguments in any direction, I believe contributor agreements are usually a real mistake, and should be avoided whenever possible.

1) getting them "right" is very hard. I would not/could not sign the Fedora agreement for years due to language that made it unclear exactly what I might be signing away rights to. At the time, I was on the X.org board, and that agreement was written in a way at that time that made it unclear if I might be speaking on behalf of the parent upstream organization, X.org (as opposed to whatever Fedora specific work I might be doing for which I have little problems giving RH rights to).

2) if you work for a corporation, you will usually have to have the agreements reviewed by legal counsel; and it effectively doubles the amount of legal effort to get something "over the wall" to benefit anyone. The inertial barrier is already high enough. And with the problems I covered in 1), you can get into dread "lawyer wait", where no one wants to take any responsibility for their actions, or because the agreement is just hard to understand and therefore review is not timely.

If you are just publishing code under a "standard" major open source license, then legal departments generally don't have to understand the licenses again and again; they internalize the specific licenses.

So contributor agreements between contributors (in a company) to a project like Ubuntu means that we go from a order N problem (of licenses) to add contributor agreements to each project that requires them.
- Jim

Ubuntu developer summit

aliguori — Wed, 11 May 2011 20:50:43 +0000

Your assertion is that because certain individuals do a disproportionate amount of work, they should get a disproportionate amount of rights to the software.

But that is not the nature of Free Software. The entire philosophy of Free Software is that everyone should have equal rights to software regardless of who participated in it's creation. Full stop.

There is simply no way you can reconcile contributor agreements with the philosophy of Free Software.

Use a different license that explicitly gives your organization special rights. Don't try to misappropriate Free Software licenses by having a secondary agreement to sign.

Ubuntu developer summit

hingo — Wed, 11 May 2011 20:43:50 +0000

Yup, and he even gives away the end game: selling the house. It's just an unfortunate fact that acquirers of Canonical will value the company higher, if they see it owning some of that valuable IPR. Some of that value is so called "imaginary property", meaning it doesn't mean anything. But some of the value comes from the fact that whoever acquires Canonical will then have the legal right to turn that code into proprietary software.

If Mark was just asking us to donate copyrights to his company, sure, I might not even mind. I never paid any money to Canonical despite having used Kubuntu for so many years. So I could give back by donating code.

But I think it is just wrong to reach out to your Free Software and Open Source community and ask them to give you their Free Software, so that you can make proprietary software out of it. I know I couldn't stand there making such an appeal.

Ubuntu developer summit

AlexHudson — Wed, 11 May 2011 20:00:59 +0000

If you think that's stretching a metaphor, fine. I think what Mark has said is pretty transparently clear; he wants clear rights and title to "his stuff".

Ubuntu developer summit

elanthis — Wed, 11 May 2011 19:29:35 +0000

I wonder how many people realize that even community parks still have owners and a select few people who end up responsible in legal situations and who have to foot the bill for basic maintenance if the community gets bored or busy with another project?

Hey, stretching metaphors out of context is fun!

Ubuntu developer summit

AlexHudson — Wed, 11 May 2011 19:10:54 +0000

"If someone gave you a plant for your garden, but asked you to agree not to sell the house if you accepted it, you likely wouldn't agree to that, he said. "It would not be generous on their part"."

I suppose that pretty much spells it out, right there. "This is my garden. Feel free to trim my hedge once a week, but, y'know, remember this is all mine".

I wonder how many people were under the impression they were working on some kind of community park, not the backyard to Mark's house.