http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2011/07/why-i-would-not-sign-a-harmony-agreement/
I would like to refer the reader to the excellent blog above. My blog can be seen as a comment for the above post.
I have re-iterated many a time that Canonical is heading for a dual licensing approach code contributed in the "free as in freedom" environment. It wants to make money out of community contributions, not from its own contributions. Why should there be a community contribution agreement between an organization which is "supposed" to foster freedom software development and the contributors who believe in "free as in freedom" philosophy? We already have a plethora of licenses to chose from, we have the free software foundation to whom we can give the copyright(if we as individual contributors are not to be bothered with the legalities of it), or we could keep the copyright assignment to ourselves which is the default.
During this year's ubuntu summit, Mark spoke at length and emphasis on contributor agreements and of course(unity). I would suggest Mark to remove all the community contributions and package the unity code written by canonical into a blob. Let him sell a "me too" osX clone with his propreitory unity front end(which many others did try). Go ahead and do it. Mark, You are muddying the "free as in freedom" waters by forcing community contributos to sign the agreement to participate in their favorite projec ie, Ubuntu GNU/Linux. Mark, You might have started the ubuntu GNU/Linux with the prospect of reaping money, but now, it is beyond ur grasps. It is in the hads of the community. The day u come out with propreitory extensions and vendor specific improvements, You will definitely see a fork(As though we dont have it now ). I have warned you.
The code is contributed by the community and belongs to the community for the community at large. Mark, You will never own it. Harmony is a backdoor entry by canonical to get as much IP as possible into their lap, thereby increasing its total worth. Harmony places the complete onus of negative impact on the developer. All the positive outcomes are to be reaped by canonical. Harmony is giving a bad example to all project which are using community contributions.
I, as a user, completely desist the cacophony of the project harmony. Booooooo... canonical
You cannot retract GPLed software though, can you? So your argument that Canonical is evil because it does good, but might not in the future, is somewhat lame. As long as they publish all contributions as GPL software, you have to come up with a different argument. If they would stop doing that, then we'd all leave, wouldn't we? But you're also very angry about people wanting to earn money. I just don't understand that. Why should programmers not be allowed to make money on their work?
ReplyDeleteBy the way, I came here hoping to see what kind of software you write, but I can't find any links. So I looked on launchpad, but I couldn't find anything there either. Are you sure you're actually a contributor? Because if you're only using other peoples software freely and not contributing a single thing, then I think you should calm down. It's kinda like people who are angry at the politicians, but who doesn't vote.
Oh, and by the way... It would be easier to take you seriously if you stopped using letters as words like "u", "ur", etc. It seems very childish.