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http://www.canonical.com/contributors/faq Quote:
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2 current versions, both have the relevant sections. http://www.canonical.com/sites/defau...-CLA-ANY-I.pdf http://www.canonical.com/sites/defau...-CLA-ANY-E.pdf Section 2.1(b)- Quote:
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In 2009 Shuttleworth said that canoncial was 'creeping toward $30 million' and '$30 million a year is self-sustaining revenue' Quote:
I havent seen Shuttleworth or anyone else from canonical for that matter say anything about canonicals financial status since then. With the banshee furor, the 'donation page' and the deals with amazon, I would guess that canonical is well into the black now. If Shuttleworth wants to make a for profit and its not making a profit, that is his problem.....and its not 'welfare' at all. But it really doesnt matter on this subject. But I'm out of time to post any more, I'll try to get that done later. |
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While you are at it go and take a look at Ubuntu Forums and see if you can find any threads on their license agreement where people, like myself, argued against it. You probably wont now considering a couple of years ago, just as I stopped posting partially because of this exact issue, they decided to "archive" (read clean up and hide from general view) alot of the forums that the "authorities of UF" felt were of no use to the general Ubuntu using public. |
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The philosophy of the initial open source drive (as manifested by the GNU documentation) does not appear to frown on charging for distributing work. So, again, contributors go into this with open eyes. I can appreciate the anger and the solution would appear to lie in channeling back to the contributor a % of the income (if generated). It seems that a practical way of doing this would be the major problem. What I also suspect is that this problem probably affects a very small percentage of people using for example Ubuntu. How many Ubuntu contributors would there be (as opposed to users)? My suspicion is that a very large percentage of those using open source stuff is unable to change the programs (meaningfully) or to contribute software on the required level. In other words, it should be possible to solve this problem on a developer level by negotiations with the individuals concerned. Perhaps an open source trade union is called for developers/code crunchers. |
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The creator is free to exploit his contribution as he seems fit regardless of what Canonical does (my interpretation). Quote:
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What is a bit fuzzy (for me) is the following in the Outbound license terms: Quote:
Copyright (and patent) law is a pretty esoteric legal area. What complicate matters further here is the fact that the contract provides it is to be interpreted by English Law. Only an English legal practitioner will be able to say with a measure of confidence what the position is at the tight spots. As regards Canonicalīs financial position, I only know that some years ago it was said that they are running at a loss. I suspect that one must assume that since about 2004 Shuttleworth has been pouring money into a loss making entity (almost 10 years now). So, if he is turning a profit, good for him. I cannot see how anyone can begrudge him that. Despite assurances that Red Hat shows that Open source can be run profitably, it seems to me a rather precarious venture where the core of your efforts has to be financed by sidelines. Not that distribution for profit is not allowed by the general philosophy: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html#header Quote:
I also wonder if he (Shuttleworth) happens to be the only shareholder. Neither here not there. Does anyone know? |
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That is in direct opposition to the GPL. You may keep the copyright to your code, but you totally loose control about its license in Canonical's projects. |
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What I do think is objectionable is that they take away your moral rights (which includes your right to have your name associated with the software -assuming that the term embraces what SA law does). |
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That is exactly the scenario the GPL tries to prevent. GPL with Canonical's CLA is nothing but a BSD license in disguise, but a BSD license that only is valid for Canonical. A nice thing for them, but without any ethics. At least they would have been honest if they would have used a BSD or MIT style license from the beginning, but honesty is something I would not expect from Canonical or Shuttleworth (oh, and not having the GPL lable on their projects would have pushed away many of their contributors). For me and many others Shuttleworth and Canonical have lost any credibility. |
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It seems to me that is why this clause which I quoted before, is important, as it ties them to the license at the stage the contribution is submitted: Quote:
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The CLA explicitly permits Canonical to relicense the code, so there is no cat in the bag from the beginning. It doesn't matter which license the code had initially when they can just relicense it. They can do it, because the contributor, the copyright holder, has explicitly given Canonical the license to do it, otherwise he is not allowed to contribute to their projects.
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Regardless of what they do, the contributor would retain his rights to market the software himself in whatever form. Is this not an important consideration? I suspect that their thinking is that value is added to the overall product as a result of the Canonical input (and the mix of various contributions). Consequently (I suspect) the argument is that if there is money to be made, they are entitled to it. The following comments are made as a matter of interest (well, new and interesting to me - a newbie). Although the GNU GPL model allows money to me made from distribution there is this prohibition: Quote:
On similar lines in the same model agreement Quote:
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It never states that the licence will be GPL, or any other open source licence. Quote:
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It would be 'neater', 'cleaner' and more attractive to closed source software supliers (or hardware suppliers who want software to go with the hardware) to avoid having to post up a BSD style copyright notice. Quote:
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Most linux kernel development is done by Red Hat, and they are a major player in a huge number of other projects. Quote:
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This has very little to do with the court case that this thread was originally about. I dont see any legal reason why the existance or profitablility of canonical should have any impact on the court case. |
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A question for the more legal minded: In theory could canonical sue you for patent infringement if you later attempted to redistribute your own code under a copyleft licence - after they had released it under a proprietary one and acquired a suitable patent???
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