On Sat, Feb 25, 2012 at 08:26:16AM +1100, Ben Finney wrote: > > I see the following as a serious issue: upstart requires contributors > > to sign the Canonical contributor agreement > > (http://www.canonical.com/contributors). > This is unlike most free-software projects, where “inbound = outbound” > <URL:http://opensource.com/law/11/7/trouble-harmony-part-1> is the > (often unstated) rule and all parties in the project are equal with > regard to licensing. > Instead, Canonical requires a contributor agreement (whose terms I can't > even read <URL:https://forms.canonical.com/contributor/>, because it > petulantly requires a site account at Launchpad) That's not the right place to read the agreement, that's the link for you to fill out the form *agreeing* to it, and for that, Canonical obviously cares about knowing who you are. ;) The right URL for this is <http://www.canonical.com/sites/default/files/active/images/Canonical-HA-CLA-ANY-I.pdf>, linked from <http://www.canonical.com/contributors>. On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 07:58:21PM +0000, Ben Hutchings wrote: > > Also, the only practical way this differs from the situation with > > software from either the Free Software Foundation or the Apache > > Software Foundation seems to be that, oddly, more people think > > Canonical is evil than think the FSF and ASF are evil. > It's not so much a question of 'is upstream evil' (if so, why are we > packaging this software?) but 'could upstream turn evil'. I'm far > from agreeing with the FSF on many issues, and I don't really believe > in the value of copyright assignment. But I also recognise that the > FSF is bound by its non-profit status and broad membership in ways > that a for-profit company like Canonical is not. I can well understand why some Free Software developers would decide not to contribute to a project that requires copyright assignment or a copyright license agreement such as this one. But it would be historical revisionism to suggest that having copyright held by a single company makes a project unsuitable to be used as the basis for work in Debian.[1] Debian has always sought to use the *technically best* free software that it can to build upon. And while maintainability is one aspect of technical quality, and it's appropriate to question the possibility of an upstream going rogue, I think it would be a shame if this question was given excessive weight when making decisions about the future of init on Linux that we're going to have to live with for some time. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/ slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org [1] Examples: MySQL as the "default" database for lots of projects; Sleepycat/BDB as the backend for plenty of software, sometimes chosen over GDBM; Qt; fox of ice and fire; and probably countless others that don't come to mind because nobody really seemed to give this a whole lot of thought until it was Canonical's name on the copyright statement...
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