LWN: Comments on "Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership"

The cost of copyleft

sbergman27 — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 03:20:41 +0000

It may very well be that copyleft is more hindrance than help. Traditionally, I've been a copyleft fan. But increasingly, I'm genuinely listening to the permissive licensing supporters. Copyleft results in such a tangled web. It scares people away. Move so far away from the GPL church as even subscribing to Python-related mailing lists, and the fear of GPL infection is readily apparent. And while there is sometimes a degree of misunderstanding, the fears are very much not completely unfounded.

Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership

sbergman27 — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 03:03:45 +0000

I don't obsess upon these things. I used to. But I don't anymore.

I do note that whatever Canonical is doing, it seems to be working. They are far and away the most popular Linux desktop distribution. While other distros have priorities which end users must take the back seat to, Ubuntu pretty much puts users first.

Regarding the other side of things: developer contributions... if you don't like the terms, don't contribute. If you're OK with them, then do. Canonical is nothing if not pragmatic. Shuttleworth and Torvalds actually have quite a lot in common when you think about it.

Idealism combined with pragmatism is far more effective than simple idealism alone.

Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership

daniels — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 22:08:52 +0000

Google also employ Scott James Remnant, the founder and lead developer of Upstart.

Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership

JanC_ — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 22:02:40 +0000

Canonical is privately owned, no way to buy it without Shuttleworth wanting it...

Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership

JanC_ — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 22:01:20 +0000

Even if ChromeOS is based on Gentoo, it still uses Upstart, and that project's code is owned by Canonical.

Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership

JanC_ — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 21:51:08 +0000

I don't know where you live, but those statements about staying free are legally binding over here... (at least to some degree).

Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership

JanC_ — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 21:38:43 +0000

I don't know if that kind of management structure could be added on top of existing licenses or would have to be written into the terms of a new license, but it seems like a viable alternative to explicit license assignment terms.

I think it would be easiest to add such a "license to re-license under conditions A, B & C and with restrictions X, Y & Z" to a contributor agreement. No need to assign copyright for that (at least not in most jurisdictions AFAIK). And in some jurisdictions signing copyright over isn't (always) possible anyway--a measure to protect individuals against greedy corporations (apparently such abuse was quite common in the music industry at some time...).

Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership

Julie — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 20:22:29 +0000

You can sell a great thing that everybody wants and if it's tap water

...hmm, we get a pretty regular bill from our water board...

or fresh air nobody will buy it.

*shush...*...*shhh...*...*Shhh...*...*SHHHH!!!*
(D'you want to give the taxman ideas??)

;-)

Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership

nix — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 19:57:41 +0000

Capitalism has two components: supplying demand and cornering the market. You can sell a great thing that everybody wants and if it's tap water or fresh air nobody will buy it.

People buy bottled tap water at enormous markups all the time. It's just not *called* tap water.

Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership

landley — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 16:45:23 +0000

Mark Shuttleworth's just doing capitalism 101.

Capitalism has two components: supplying demand and cornering the market. You can sell a great thing that everybody wants and if it's tap water or fresh air nobody will buy it. (Use it sure, pay you for it no.)

What you have to do to get rich is prevent customers from being able to get it anywhere _else_, so they have no choice but to pay you for it. Nobody pays a toll to cross a bridge without the river.

Another way to look at this is you can get paid in two ways: taxing and tipping. If you don't pay your taxes large men will take your stuff and drag you off to jail. But nobody has to put money in a tip jar, they do so because they want to, because they like what you did and want to encourage it (or because you managed to guilt them into it). Taxes fund governments, which get very big. Tipping funds waiters and webcartoonists and garage bands and the guy who writes Dwarf Fortress. It may provide some of the money for PBS, but it'll never make you a billionaire because by itself it doesn't scale that much.

Tipping happens because people _like_ you, ala "buy Linus a beer". Taxing happens because they have no choice, ala "sell your house to pay for the operation". Most purchases have elements of both, "I need food but I like this food". Sometimes it's even explicitly layered: you buy concert tickets because you like the band, but 3/4 of the money goes to the ticketmaster monopoly owned by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.

Mark Shuttleworth is trying to corner the market on projects he controls. He's wants something his competitors don't (can't) have. It's not as explicit as AT&T buying T-Mobile (and Verizon lining up to buy sprint, which leases its network to clear and such) to prevent customers from having any flat-rate wireless options and _forcing_ them into pay-per-byte overage schemes, but it's the same motivation. He's trying to make his company profitable by giving his customers less choice (I.E. fewer alternatives).

Cornering the market is half of capitalism. Patents are about cornering the market. Trusted computing is about cornering the market. DVD encryption (decss and region locking) is about cornering the market. And Mark Shuttleworth's copyright assignment campaign is about cornering the market so Ubuntu has an edge over its competitors.

Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership

jospoortvliet — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 16:31:25 +0000

It does take away from the claim that the company always has to maintain everything and community contributors are just having fun so they have less moral rights... While surely a random contributor dumping a huge feature happens, many start with small maintenance patches. And surely, doing documentation and 'the final touch' are hard to do in FOSS, they can be equally hard in the corporate world...

Upstream copyright assignment; Ubuntu distribution vs. Canonical upstream

sladen — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 14:03:41 +0000

To quote from Mark Shuttleworth's statements in the linked article:

We (Canonical) have signed many contribution agreements with companies and non-profits that are stewards of upstream components, from the FSF to MySQL and Qt.
Im happy to donate (fully and irreversibly) a patch to a maintainer, and Canonical generally does assign patches to upstreams

Note that the Canonical CLA applies to (upstream) projects managed by Canonical. The Ubuntu and Debian distributions themselves do not have contributor licence agreementsalthough one would be expected to adhere to the ideals of the Ubuntu Code of Conduct and the Debian Social Contract, respectively.

Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership

etienne — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 08:52:55 +0000

So when someone at Canonical make a patch to a subsystem, do they sign the upstream copyright assignment agreement - or do they keep the patch for Ubuntu only?

Copyright Licence Agreement != Copyright Assignment Agreement

rfontana — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 23:45:29 +0000

The old Fedora CLA was interpreted by the Fedora Project in a manner similar to its replacement (that is, the broad inbound copyright license grant for contributed code is a default that contributors can opt out of through explicit licensing). The language of the old Fedora CLA (not present in the ancestral Apache CLA) facilitated this interpretation; the same does not appear to be true of this Harmony permutation being used by Canonical.

I understand that for some developers a maximalist CLA seems more psychologically palatable than copyright assignment, because of the important symbolism of holding on to legal ownership of the contribution rather than transferring it, but the legal reality is that they are virtually the same thing.

The cost of copyleft

martinfick — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 22:27:29 +0000

While I am a fan of copyleft, the fact is that using simpler free software licenses obliviates the need for copyright assignments. That being the case, most of the Mark's arguments fly right out the window. All the costs that he is trying to justify the need for assignment with, are not valid if they do not directly derive from the cost of maintaining copyleft software. Throwing trademark issues in the mix, comparing to physical world, ... etc. is just an attempt to obfuscate and confuse the issue to his advantage.

Copyleft does have a cost, but those are the only relevant costs here. If he doesn't like the cost, why choose a copyleft license?

Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership

jspaleta — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 22:14:59 +0000

Julie,

As far as I am aware, you are the first person to actually notice the change. I'm not aware that anyone inside the Canonical fenceline or inside the Ubuntu community were made aware of the change going live. If you happen to catch wind of a public announcement anywhere, please provide a link to it here so we can all get up to speed.

-jef

Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership

Julie — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 22:10:59 +0000

...based there because of the comparatively generous tax laws compared to mainland UK...

Oh, and because it's a beautiful island with its own weather system and a distinct absence of us mainland riffraff, of course... :-)

Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership

Julie — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 21:59:38 +0000

The Isle of Man is a funny one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isle_of_man

I always assumed that Mark was based there because of the comparatively generous tax laws compared to mainland UK (no Capital Gains Tax, for example) but there may be other benefits with regards to law or status that he/Canonical could take advantage of. Presumably (at least according to this Canonical document) this can't include copyright law.

Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership

Julie — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 21:42:09 +0000

It appears that Canonical switched the text of its agreement _after_ Shuttleworth wrote his blog entry that this comment track is under.

Oops, how odd, I wonder if they told him... ;-)
Thanks for the clarification.

Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership

mgedmin — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 21:24:55 +0000

IANAL, but if you go to http://www.canonical.com/contributors and download the agreement PDF, you'll see section 6.1 mentions UK law explicitly:

6.1 This Agreement will be governed by and construed in
accordance with the laws of the United Kingdom excluding
its conflicts of law provisions. Under certain circumstances,
the governing law in this section might be superseded by
the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the
International Sale of Goods (UN Convention) and the
parties intend to avoid the application of the UN Convention
to this Agreement and, thus, exclude the application of the
UN Convention in its entirety to this Agreement.

Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership

jspaleta — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 19:37:33 +0000

Julie,

It appears that Canonical switched the text of its agreement _after_ Shuttleworth wrote his blog entry that this comment track is under. He even refers to Canonical's policy as one based on assignment with a broad license back to the contributor. What he wrote doesn't make any sense at all if the new agreement was in effect on the date he wrote his blog entry.

A lot of what Shuttleworth is trying to argue about the need for ownership has been mooted by the unannounced change in agreement language. It's a bit disturbing really. Why would Shuttleworth go through all the trouble of standing up all the rhetoric about ownership if the plan with in mere days of the blog post was to silently switch over to a policy that no longer demands ownership at all? Very very confusing and highly irrational behavior for Shuttleworth and Canonical. And while I'm not unhappy with the change, I am concerned about the contradictory messages the unannounced change and the public post sends. Up till now everyone inside Canonical has been so very very good about staying on message. Even when they had to back peddle away from a policy decision they were on message in the retreat. The divergence between messaging and policy now is a little bit eyebrow raising and honestly I don't know what to think about it.

-jef

Copyright Licence Agreement != Copyright Assignment Agreement

rahulsundaram — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 18:31:05 +0000

Not a lawyer but cursory reading suggests the current as with the old Fedora CLA are both broadly based on the Apache CLA and have similar clauses. One important difference however is in how it is applied. Red Hat didn't require anyone to sign the Fedora CLA in order to contribute patches to projects it managed. While a similar CLA was being used in some other projects, that has been systematically dismantled, thanks in large part to Richard Fontana.

While the current agreement is a improvement, I hope Canonical drops this and just accepts contributions under standard free and open source licenses. If they want the right to relicense under proprietary licenses, they could just permissively license their projects.

Copyright Licence Agreement != Copyright Assignment Agreement

jspaleta — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 17:55:29 +0000

Rahul,

On first reading, isn't this very close to the older Fedora CLA before the participation agreement approach? The older Fedora CLA did give Red Hat broad sublicensing rights as well.

The big thing is, now that the assignment requirement is gone, you can actually sign this CLA as well as similar peer CLAs and continue to meet the "I own my contribution" requirment. The biggest problem with the assignment clause in any vendor's contributor agreement has always been the inability to then layer the same contributed code again under another vendor equivalent conditions. You can't have an ecosystem of assignment clauses. But you can have an ecosystem of broad licensing clauses.

Yes, it's not going to be optimal for every potential contributor, but its no longer a non-starter because of its exclusivity nature. I can live with this agreement and be a party to it, and still lobby for something better instead of having to stand outside and without contributions.

-jef

Copyright Licence Agreement != Copyright Assignment Agreement

jspaleta — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 17:49:15 +0000

Yes, the new contributor agreement language seems much more reasonable. I really really hope they give everyone who signed on under the old agreement the chance to resign under the new language.

On first reading there is nothing in there that would prevent me from signing it. It appears to be nearly equivalent to CLAs I've already agreed to sign with regard to broad licensing granted Canonical while allowing me to keep ownership. This solves the biggest problem with the old agreement language from my personal POV. Unless I find a wrinkle on second reading that I'm not seeing now, I now have no personal grievance to withhold submitting patches since its so similar to conditions I have already agreed to from other vendors in the past.

So hats off to Canonical for taking a step in the right direction with the new language.

-jef

Copyright Licence Agreement != Copyright Assignment Agreement

rahulsundaram — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 17:46:04 +0000

Canonical seems to have switched silently to one of the Harmony agreements and this is a step up compared to the previous agreement however I would note that 2.1 grants the right to sublicense very broadly and 2.3 explicitly reserves the right to relicense the contributions under a proprietary license. So yes, you now get to keep your copyright but Canonical gets a very broad license to do pretty much whatever they want. In terms of clarity of purpose, this is indeed better.

Copyright Licence Agreement != Copyright Assignment Agreement

jspaleta — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 17:13:18 +0000

Indeed it has changed. When did it change to using harmony language? Was there a notification or any sort of announcement as to when they switched that I missed?

AND more important for everyone who previous agreed to the assignment language are they going to be given a chance to retroactively convert their contributions to the new agreement?

-jef

Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership

nye — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 16:05:33 +0000

>The most obvious problem with this position is the assumption that contributors will do nothing other than provide code and then vanish

More than that, it assumes that 'code contributions' and 'maintenance' are orthogonal issues.

In reality a significant minority - possibly even a majority - of small one-off contributions *are* *maintenance*. Most of the people reading this have probably sent in small patches to some piece of software or another, fixing a crash that happens in a specific case, or some bug that eventually gets too annoying to ignore.

Having to fill in and post some pieces of paper to another country in order to do that is crazy talk.

Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership

rsidd — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 15:51:39 +0000

Sorry, I misunderstood that point. Yes, indeed contributions can be maintenance -- but I think most "maintenance" contributions would tend to be short (2-3 line) bugfixes (fixing buffer overflows, etc) and would not qualify for copyright protection in any case...

Copyright Licence Agreement != Copyright Assignment Agreement

sladen — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 15:47:32 +0000

I think the more likely explanation here is that Julie has actually read the current Canonical CLA, where-as Jef perhaps hasn't:

www.canonical.com/contributors/

Requesting a transfer of copyrights is a fairly big step compared to simply requesting a permissive licence. I don't think it's helpful to blur or redefine the two terms.

Julie: I would stick to your original understanding of the two separate terms!

Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership

ewan — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 12:41:05 +0000

IIRC Canonical is registered on the Isle Of Man. While I imagine the applicable copyright law is identical to English law, I'm not sure it's strictly accurate to say that English law applies.

Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership

mjg59 — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 12:40:52 +0000

Really? Canonical's headquartered on the Isle of Man. The law of England and Wales doesn't seem like the most relevant concern, even if statute is mostly equivalent.

Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership

Wol — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 12:17:51 +0000

Bear in mind the gist of Berne is "no special treatment for locals". So I think you're wrong, but you do raise an interesting point that could cause legal mayhem :-)

As far as I am aware, it is the law of England and Wales that applies to Ubuntu. So, as far as we are concerned, American law is irrelevant. If you execute a transfer that complies with English Law, then Ubuntu is the copyright owner everywhere that jurisdiction applies.

If, however, that transfer does not comply with American law, Ubuntu may well have trouble claiming copyright in America :-)

Cheers,
Wol

Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership

ingwa — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 11:45:15 +0000

With all due respect, how do you know anything about the Canonical finances? I would be very interested to find out more, and I'd be grateful if you could give me some pointers.

Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership

ewan — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 10:09:47 +0000

No, but the point was not that when I give you a contribution it "includes maintenance", but that the set of all contributions contains patches that are maintenance effort, as well as patches that require ongoing maintenance effort. Indeed, I rather suspect that a lot of the 'drive by' patches that copyright assignment has such a chilling effect on are indeed maintenance ones, as people fix individual bugs that are bothering them.

It's a nonsense to suggest that all maintenance effort must come from the project/company and that contributors therefore somehow owe them for that.

Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership

rsidd — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 09:01:36 +0000

And contributions INCLUDE maintenance so pretending all maintenance has to be done by 'the project' (*company*) is dishonest (I'm not saying you do, but Shuttleworth seems to)

Not always. Probably not most of the time. People who contribute a patch -- even a large, non-trivial one that adds significant features -- to an existing project are generally not expected to maintain that patch forever.

Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership

foom — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 23:15:03 +0000

That'd be just like the old days again. :)

(Mac OS upgrades were all free until System 7.1 in 1992.)

Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership

jspaleta — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 22:14:06 +0000

First, let me point out that those statements are not legally binding. What is your recourse if at some point in time Canonical decided to build a proprietary product and brand it Ubuntu. Do you know where the sources are for the Ubuntu Light product that Dell demo'd at a UDS last year? I found the binary iso on Dell's support site, but the sources? I never found them. That's a bit worrying, but I let it slide because Dell never actually shipped a product with Ubuntu Light pre-installed and I'm not going to go beating down doors for sources for a failed product demo. That would just be adding insult to injury, and that's never been my intent.

Second of all, The UbuntuOne service stands an example of how Canonical can choose to re-intepret that statement to their benefit. UbuntuOne is not "free" not in price and not in terms of the foundational freedoms of the codebase running the backend service. And the use of the Ubuntu brand for the service has been somewhat controversial inside the Ubuntu community. The service components that Canonical runs are not open for contribution without an NDA, and yet its branded as Ubuntu. The UbuntuOne service as it is constructed and branded could be interpreted as breaking that promise. But again it doesn't really matter if they break the promise or not, as its not a legally binding promise, and there's no legal recourse anyone can take to make them abide by the promise.

Some would consider Canonical playing fast and loose with the Ubuntu brand when it comes to U1. But its an example of a larger problem we have as an ecosystem. We as a larger ecosystem have not really figured out yet what it means to be open in a world dominated by online services that are ultimately out of the control of the end-users. We are way behind the curve there. AGPL licensing is a stake in the ground in the debate, but we still don't have a strong consensus view in the space.

-jef

Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership

sciurus — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 21:45:28 +0000

From the Ubuntu website on October 14, 2004: Ubuntu will always be free of charge, and there is no extra fee for the "enterprise edition", we make our very best work available to everyone on the same Free terms.
From the Ubuntu website today (accessed on July 24, 2011): Ubuntu is free. Always has been and always will be. From the operating system to security updates, storage to software.

Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership

Julie — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 21:16:35 +0000

Apple has figured out the business models of service, support, and content.

...and selling expensive (if elegant) hardware and devices with their operating system and software pre-installed on them as an inclusive, locked-down unit. Don't forget if you buy Lion it's either a) pre-installed on a new (Apple) machine or b) as an upgrade for a pre-existing Mac (with the latest version of Snow Leopard), not a standalone system you can install on any manufacturer's machine you choose. The license agreement for my Mac's OSX (which admittedly is rather old - they may have changed the terms but somehow I doubt it) explicitly prohibits me from doing this. They may eventually give the OS away as a free upgrade - but they are making too much from the locked-down model to change that.

Shuttleworth: The responsibilities of ownership

allison — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 20:22:01 +0000

There's no business in selling operating systems anymore. Have you seen the price tag on Mac OS X Lion? $29.99. $29.99?! You can't run a successful business on that. Apple has figured out the business models of service, support, and content. FLOSS figured out the first two a long time ago, and is diving right into the third (e.g. Android Marketplace) . If Microsoft hasn't figured this out yet, they'll be forced into it soon enough by market pressure. (Or, maybe they already have, they're making an awfully big deal out of their "cloud" services.) How much you want to bet Apple gives away the OS for free within 5 years? Works for the iPad, and they can't have missed noticing the screaming success there.