Originally posted by GizmoChicken
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It just backfired, and now it is a Canonical issue.
In all seriousness, although I don’t have a crystal ball, I don’t foresee Canonical ever attempting to exercise their option to relicense Mir under a license other than GPL.
Really there is nothing wrong with choosing an opensource permissive license, but no, they wanted to keep the right of making it closed for themselves only.
CLA includes several other notable provisions, including a provision that seeks to prevent a contributor from later suing the project for infringing that contributor's patent(s) covering the contribution
Yet, no one has been able to “pull tricks” or “pull an EEE” with the X Window System in any way that has resulted in “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.”
Assuming the GPL version of Mir ever becomes “very common everywhere” and "widespread" on Linux desktops (which even you doubt will happen), what leads you to think that Canonical could “pull an EEE” on the community?
The target of an EEE are either company-grade distros (that can and do ship their own proprietary stuff) or similar, and rely on the money from their customers to stay profitable.
Which is why RedHat especially was so afraid of CLA.
Still, that's not how licenses work.
Licenses are supposed to make sure something does not happen as they specifically rule out things.
Otherwise a solemn oath over the bible from Canonical would suffice.
according to the Free Software Foundation's Licensing and Compliance Lab, “[i]f you are the copyright holder for the code, you can release it under various different non-exclusive licenses at various times.” That is, the copyright holder can release a program under the GNU GPL, and can also use that same code in non-free programs.
Are you suggesting a change to current policy?
By accepting contributions under a their CLA, Canonical hasn’t “stolen” anything.
Which is more like a very big gift, and not so common thing to ask in opensource. Both the copyleft camp and permissive camp don't usually like making exceptions, the same rules apply to all contributors/users of the project.
would “it would be totally fine” with you if Canonical continued Mir under GPL, but refused to accept any outside contributions for Mir?
It would make 0 sense though, worst license for an embedded product, while no contributions (which is the point of opensource licenses).
Quite frankly, given a choice between: (a) Mir being released under a permissive license (such as MIT) from the start; or (b) Mir being released under GPL, but with Canonical retaining the right to release an improved non-GPL version of Mir later (which right a copyright holder has by default and is permitted to do), I don’t get why you would prefer option (a)
Also, the bolded part is misleading. While they can do so for their code, the issue here is contributions, Canonical isn't the copyright holder of the contributed code.
So B isn't an option without the CLA that grants them the ability to do so.
As for why Google didn’t pursue something like option (b) with Android, I suspect that Google has its own competitive (and perhaps legal) reasons. But in any case, the choice was Google’s to make.
Canonical's development of Mir is by no means dependent on contributions.
The whole point of being opensource is sharing the load, if you are not leveraging that to your advantage, you're using opensource wrong (in the sense of not getting any benefit from it).
And yeah, Canonical has a long tradition of using opensource wrong.
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