On Oct 31, 2013, at 06:10 PM, Lars Wirzenius wrote:
>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.
All developers need to make up their own[*] minds on such issues of course, so
I would never tell you that you're wrong. I could tell you my own opinion,
but I'm not sure that anyone would really care. :)
As a project leader for a GNU project owned by the FSF that does require
copyright assignments, I can tell you that FSF policy occasionally prevents me
from accepting code from people who can't or won't sign the copyright
assignments.
The argument goes: why should I have to give up my ownership rights in order
for you to accept my changes? The analogy is made to a musician who had
(has?) to give their copyrights over to the record company in order to make an
album. Those musicians lost control over their music.
(Of course, I'm not morally equating the FSF to record companies. :)
The trade-off in the two approaches is between retaining copyright while
allowing the possibility of non-free use (CLA) vs. giving up copyright but
guaranteeing free use (FSF). The FLOSS world has a very wide range of such
contributor agreements, such as the Python Software Foundation license which
lets you retain copyright and promises that your changes (and derivatives
there-of) to always be available under an open source license.
In any event, my point was to be factually accurate about exactly the deal
that you agree to in order to contribute to upstart.
Cheers,
-Barry
[*] or have their employers make up their minds for them. ;)
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