Mir's GPLv3 License Is Now Raising Concerns

[seb24]

No, the server is licensed with GPLv3. Only the client side is licensed under LGPLv3. If you want to link the server against a proprietary driver you'll need an extra license from Canonical.

In fact you have Shared part and the client part in LGPL

http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~mir-team/mir/trunk/files

[valeriodean]

All devs know (or should know) that to send code to canonical means sign the CLA.
So, if you signed it, you have accepted it and I don't care nothing about that.
You are the owner of you code, if you decide to donate it to Canonical, than it's a your decision.

About...

It's good to have 3000 different distribution 10 Desktop environment but not 2 different Graphic Server. (or you can do it but not Canonical)

Again with this bullshit?
Try to use your brain for recognize the differences between a linux distro/DE and a display server, you should find a big external player that don't play any role in the linux distro/DE proliferation but that play a decisive role in the display server's success or its fail.
Now you can choice one distro/DE without take care about binary blob interference in your choice, but this is no more true in case of a display server.
If nvidia/amd will provide EGL support for their driver then ok, for me there is no problem in the "EGL-type display server proliferation" scenario, otherwise there is a problem.

[brent]

Exampple :
- Lot of people say Mir and Unity are proprietary but they are in GPLv3 Licence
- It's good to have 3000 different distribution 10 Desktop environment but not 2 different Graphic Server. (or you can do it but not Canonical)
- GPLv3 is good unless Canonical use it. In this case it's bad...
etc.

Yes, there is a lot of hypocrisy going on and a lot of people have obvious double standards. I don't think that's me, though. I never was a fan of the GPLv3. It is a very controversial (and IMHO pretty bad) license.

[chrisb]

You've missed the point. The CLA mean that Canonical can sell proprietary licenses to hardware vendors without changing anything.

Contributor copyright agreements aren't necessarily evil or unusual. Other projects that require copyright assignment: Android, Gentoo, OpenJDK, every FSF project (!!!), every Apache SF project, OpenOffice, etc.

http://people.gnome.org/~michael/blo...ght-assignment has a write up of the advantages and disadvantages of requiring copyright assignment. In general I'm not a fan, but I understand why organisations sometimes require it, and it doesn't necessarily mean there is bad intent.

[chrisb]

Yes, there is a lot of hypocrisy going on and a lot of people have obvious double standards. I don't think that's me, though. I never was a fan of the GPLv3. It is a very controversial (and IMHO pretty bad) license.

It is only thing controversial if you see it from the "GPL is a cancer" point of view. Otherwise its just GPLv2+bugfix (yes, enabling users rights to be worked around was a bug, the FSF was always crystal clear that users should have the right to modify software. They clearly never intended their software to be used in completely locked down devices which the user can't modify, or for users to be denied access to source code because the manufacturer of a device says the user owns the device but the software on it is only "leased")

[aironeous]

What does Jolla use?

[chrisb]

But why is CLA so important for Canonical?

Red Hat and Google (Android) make a very good business without a similar licensing (AFAIK).
And they're also investing a lot. I'd say way more than Canonical.

Red Hat and Google both also require copyright and patent to be licensed from contributors.

Red hat agreement: http://www.redhat.com/licenses/ccmpl.html

Google Android agreement: http://source.android.com/source/cla-individual.html

[ZeroPointEnergy]

You've missed the point. The CLA mean that Canonical can sell proprietary licenses to hardware vendors without changing anything.

Which I addressed in my comment. If you open your hardware you get it for free, if you don't you pay. Which benefits the vendor with open hardware. CLA is not uncommon in Open Source and you are still free to fork the project if you really want. In the end it's canonical that develops the software and pays the developers. And they still grant you huge freedoms. Why do you think you are entitled to get that software for free if you in turn screw your customers with locked hardware?

[TheBlackCat]

Contributor copyright agreements aren't necessarily evil or unusual. Other projects that require copyright assignment: Android, Gentoo, OpenJDK, every FSF project (!!!), every Apache SF project, OpenOffice, etc.

CLA is one of the reasons LibreOffice exists in the first place. And surely you have heard of the legal problems around Java (one of the pieces of code that Google got sued over was a piece of code written by the same guy who wrote the corresponding code in Java).

[seb24]

No, the server is licensed with GPLv3. Only the client side is licensed under LGPLv3. If you want to link the server against a proprietary driver you'll need an extra license from Canonical.

They use LGPL for client and shared libraries...