On Sun, 2011-09-25 at 20:54 +0100, Stroller wrote: > The end users do not give a monkey's uncle about the CLA. They just > want to use the software, and our distro already provides Sun Java > binaries, Unreal Tournament and stuff under all sorts of licenses. If > people want to use it, and it's in the package manager, then they > will. You are very much an exception, IMO, taking ethical exception to > Canonical's CLA.
I think the important thing, for me anyway, is not the general user community, but the "open source" development community. Most of those people reluctant to sign their code over to another organization. Let's say, for example, that Linus Torvalds goes into another one of his "Your desktop environment sucks!" tirades and starts creating a bunch of patches to Unity. I somehow doubt he's going to add to that "and here are some patches and by the way you can have complete copyright to it." Or what if Red Hat designates some of their programmers to help make Unity integrate better with Fedora, but wants to push those changes upstream (like a good free software citizen). I somehow doubt Red Hat is going to want to pay their employees to write code and turn over ownership of it to Canonical. I can just see the press release now: "Red Hat and Canonical Announce New Software License Agreement". Huh? What? But it's *free* software!? > > Unity is GPL. It can always be forked. Yeah, but not everyone is going to want to fork an entire software project just to contribute some code and retain the rights to their own code. Say for example someone is really passionate about accessibility and wants to contribute to make desktop accessibility better, but doesn't want to sign a CLA? They're not going to fork just for that. No want wants "Unity-fork with accessibility patches" they want "Unity with improved accessibility". This is why large community-lead free software projects like Linux, KDE, and GNOME rarely have forks aside from a few corporate-sponsored forks to fill a niche (e.g. Android). One could argue that Unity *is* a corporate-sponsored fork (of GNOME) to fill a niche. -a
