Hugo Roy <[email protected]> wrote: > + 2014-02-07 Fri 14:58, Fabian Keil <[email protected]>: > > > Fellowship of FSFE <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > > - Matthew Garrett criticised Canonical's contributor agreement[19]. > > > Other copyright assignment tools, such as FSFE's Fiduciary License > > > Agreement[20] and the GNU Project's copyright assignment, enable > > > developers to prevent their code from being used in non-free software. > > > In contrast, Canonical's agreement explicitly states that the company > > > may distribute people's contributions under non-free licenses. If you > > > value software freedom, FSFE recommends you not to sign agreements > > > which make it possible to distribute your code under non-free > > > licenses. > > > > Is this recommendation, the reasoning behind it and the process > > that led to it documented somewhere? > > > > The recommendation seems to imply that people who prefer or don't > > object to non-viral free software licenses don't value software > > freedom.
> First, there's no such thing as a “viral” free software license. You may not like the term, but this doesn't mean that it doesn't exist: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_license > Second, this is not about whether people prefer BSD/MIT-style > licenses or (A/L)GPL-style. This is about assigning your copyright > to an entity in a way that makes it possible for that entity to > decide on their own if they want to release as proprietary > software or not something that include your contribution. This doesn't require copyright assignment, though. The same can and does happen with what you refer to as liberal licenses. Assumingly a lot of free-software-valueing people are fine with this or they would have chosen different licenses. > It may > very well be possible that the whole is never released as Free > Software at all, whether under a liberal license or under a > protective license. Again, this doesn't require copyright assignment. Even Matthew Garret only seems to be concerned about copyleft licenses (and how Canonical defends the CLA): | ... Canonical ship software under the GPLv3 family of licenses | (GPL, AGPL and LGPL) but require that contributors sign an agreement | that permits Canonical to relicense their contributions under a | proprietary license. This is a fundamentally different situation | to almost all widely accepted CLAs, and it's disingenuous for | Canonical to defend their CLA by pointing out the broad community | uptake of, for instance, the Apache CLA. http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/29160.html > Third, to answer your question, this was discussed many times > within FSFE, especially in the process that led to the FLA > http://fsfe.org/activities/ftf/fla.html years ago. > > As far as this bit in the newsletter goes, it was discussed > including in FSFE's legal team. Is the discussion documented somewhere? Fabian
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature
_______________________________________________ Discussion mailing list [email protected] https://mail.fsfeurope.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion
