Re: Bug#727708: tech-ctte: Decide which init system to default to in Debian.
On Thu, Oct 31, 2013 at 10:14:06AM -0400, Barry Warsaw wrote:
> Actually, contributing to Upstart does not require copyright assignment (as
> for example, would contributing to an FSF-owned GNU project). Instead, it
> requires a Contributor License Agreement be signed:
>
> http://www.canonical.com/contributors
Quoting from the PDF linked from that page ("Canonical Individual
Contributor License Agreement" for individual contributors):
Based on the grant of rights in Sections 2.1 and 2.2, if We
include Your Contribution in a Material, We may license the
Contribution under any license, including copyleft,
permissive, commercial, or proprietary licenses.
In other words, Canonical gets the right to take a free software
contribution and make it proprietary. The contributors gets to own the
software, and can continue releasing it as free software, but can't
prevent Canonical from making non-free versions of it. I don't find
that an acceptable situation.
Compare that to the FSF, where they guarantee the contributed software
will always remain free software. (Also, not all GNU projects require
copyright assignment.) Both Canonical and the FSF want you to give
them something, but the FSF promises to keep it free, and indeed, goes
to great lengths to define (in the copyright assignment contract) what
it means for the software to be free: it's not just "whatever license
the FSF wants to use".
Disclaimer: I've not assigned any copyrights to the FSF, I have merely
read around the debates on this and listened to many "Free as in
freedom" oggcast episodes with Bradley Kuhn and Karen Sandler
(http://faif.us/).
--
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