Snapd 2.31 Better Supports Wayland Via Mir, Canonical Hires Another Mir Developer

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Snapd 2.31 Better Supports Wayland Via Mir, Canonical Hires Another Mir Developer

Besides Mir 0.30 being released this week, other Mir progress was also made by these Canonical developers working on forging Mir into a viable Wayland compositor...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mir-Snapd-And-Another-Dev

[pharaone]

I'm very happy to see that Mir is still alive!

[KRiloshart]

Recent news makes me feel that canonical has learnt from its past mistakes and trying hard to be good boy.

Anyways it's good.

[Vistaus]

So first they fire people from the MIR team and then they hire someone? Good strategy...

[Awesomeness]

So first they fire people from the MIR team and then they hire someone? Good strategy...

And they don't drop their CLA.

[starshipeleven]

And they don't drop their CLA.

The only reason Mir still exists is because of the CLA, that allows them to sell it with a different license.

[GizmoChicken]

The only reason Mir still exists is because of the CLA, that allows them to sell it with a different license.

Whether or not Canonical ever intends to sell Mir under a different license, I don't know, and I won't speculate. But it is worth noting that Canonical's CLA (both for individuals or entities) contains the following condition:

[Canonical] agree to also license the Contribution under the terms of the license or licenses which [Canonical] are using for the Material on the Submission Date.

That is, even if Canonical were to change the license at some point in the future, everything contributed under the CLA will remain available for distribution under the license that was in effect at the time of the contribution, which, for Mir, is currently GNU General Public License version 2 or 3.

[Luke_Wolf]

Whether or not Canonical ever intends to sell Mir under a different license, I don't know, and I won't speculate. But it is worth noting that Canonical's CLA (both for individuals or entities) contains the following condition:



That is, even if Canonical were to change the license at some point in the future, everything contributed under the CLA will remain available for distribution under the license that was in effect at the time of the contribution, which, for Mir, is currently GNU General Public License version 2 or 3.

As opposed to what exactly? The terms of Open Source licenses including the GPL are such that a license to the code cannot be arbitrarily revoked, with it already being under GPL of course they'll remain available for distribution under the GPL, to do otherwise would violate the GPL itself. That doesn't mean in the worst case that you get access to any new code if they go full proprietary, simply that they have to give you the last release for which there were GPLed releases. Copyright Assignment can't change code that is already out there.

[starshipeleven]

Whether or not Canonical ever intends to sell Mir under a different license, I don't know, and I won't speculate.

CLA exists to allow them to relicense their stack for embedded world where GPL is scary. Qt does a similar thing too, with their dual licensing and CLA.

I'm not saying this is necessarily wrong, just stating facts.

But it is worth noting that Canonical's CLA (both for individuals or entities) contains the following condition:

That's very nice of them, but as Luke pointed out, this is already the norm. You cannot change the license retroactively, so whatever was out before will remain out with the same license.

The point here is that this would allow Canonical to pull tricks like letting some components become very common everywhere (ala systemd) and then change license, causing massive havok and forcing people to do their bidding or face massive issues in either maintaining themselves the last opensource stack or migrate to something else.

Meanwhile, stuff that got very widespread, like systemd, has a plain GPL license, no CLA, no bullshit. Even playing field for all. Same for Xorg (some kind of permissive license) and so on.

Qt is an exception mostly due to legacy reasons, and there is still GTK if Qt becomes unavailable, while for a display server or systemd-like init system, it would be much harder to just switch (and even then most distros support both).

[GizmoChicken]

As opposed to what exactly?

Are you asking me? Or are asking someone who (unlike me) is under the mistaken impression that Canonical's CLA is an attempt circumvent GPL?

Sure, provisions in the GPL should be sufficient to allay fears that Canonical is somehow scheming against the community. But for whatever reason, some seem to be under the mistaken impression that Canonical's CLA is an attempt circumvent GPL. And so I quoted directly from Canonical's own CLA to demonstrate that such fears are unwarranted.

Also, I'll just note that an agreement is generally construed against the drafter. Canonical didn't draft the GPL. But a court would consider Canonical to be the drafter of its own CLA, and so Canonical would find it much more difficult to argue that the provisions of its own CLA are ambiguous or unenforceable.

You cannot change the license retroactively, so whatever was out before will remain out with the same license.

Yep.

The point here is that this would allow Canonical to pull tricks like letting some components become very common everywhere (ala systemd) and then change license, causing massive havok and forcing people to do their bidding or face massive issues in either maintaining themselves the last opensource stack or migrate to something else.

As you (and Luke) point out, everything released before the change in license would still be available for distribution after the change. So, as you also point out, even if Mir becomes very common, and then Canonical changes the license, the community could continue to rely on (and improve a fork of) whatever version of Mir that had been relied on before the change. Sure, the community would need to maintain a fork moving forward. But that's no different from any time that a maintainer walks away from a project, whether due to lack of interest, financial reasons, or otherwise.

If Mir becomes very common, and then Canonical changes the license, but the community fails to create a fork of the last GPL version, well, . . . I don't foresee that happening. If it does happen, shame on the community.

Meanwhile, stuff that got very widespread, like systemd, has a plain GPL license, no CLA, no bullshit. Even playing field for all. Same for Xorg (some kind of permissive license) and so on.

If a project wants to accept code without retaining an ability to relicense the code, that's up to the project. But what happens if a project wants to change its license for a socially beneficial reason, but is prevented from doing so? For example, although some dispute the claim, it has been claimed that Oracle would be willing to relicense ZFS under GPL, but is prevented from doing so because it doesn't have the legal right to do so.

But in any case, if, at some time in the future, Canonical feels that they can take Mir further under the ASL2.0 license (or a similar license, like BSD, MIT, etc.), so long as code contributed prior to the change remains available under GPL, I would have no problem with such a change. It’s Canonical's baby. I wish them luck with it.