Mir's GPLv3 License Is Now Raising Concerns

[duby229]

I didn't followed up the Nexuiz story in detail...did it had a CLA ?!?

Yeah, that is how Xonotic was born. Nexuiz was essentially sold and made proprietary, the oss code was forked and made into xonotic. So yeah, it's still around in the form of Xonotic, but at the same time Nexuiz is being used as a proprietary game.

[Serge]

How is a GPL + rights assignment approach worse for user freedom than a permissive licensiing approach? Canonical's approach requires manufacturers / carriers to pay for the right to close derivatives, and that's something they wouldn't have to pay for with permissive licenses, but I am having a hard time figuring out how this hurts or helps end-user freedom.

[spacetoilet]

Fun forum game: try to find one dee. post where he doesn't mention that Canonical is evil and how there are "real" reasons why you should hate Mir.

More unsubstantiated paranoia.

in Germany you cant go out and say Canonical is evil you dont have freedom of speech and btw did you have your baba today?

[chrisb]

How did you found that carrier was using that server for image compression ? A specific program or something from command line ?

TIA,
AJSB

Try to zoom a "high resolution" image on your phone - if your carrier transparently replaces it (mine does) then zooming makes it is pretty obvious that the quality has been altered. Or, even easier, just look at the file size and compare it to what is supposed to be on the web server.

My carrier also compresses HTML; doing that can break apps that expect their server-side HTML pages to be downloaded as-is by the client.

[RahulSundaram]

How is a GPL + rights assignment approach worse for user freedom than a permissive licensiing approach? Canonical's approach requires manufacturers / carriers to pay for the right to close derivatives, and that's something they wouldn't have to pay for with permissive licenses, but I am having a hard time figuring out how this hurts or helps end-user freedom.

The answer is in the blog post and comments but to summarize:

Permissive license gives everyone the same rights. However copyleft + CLA means the only the single vendor who holds all of the copyright is able to relicense or create a proprietary fork if they want to which is why copyleft + CLA is worse than permissive licensing unless the copyright license agreement itself has some legal safeguards similar to FSF agreements.

https://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/assigning-copyright

[Luke]

Is this with your computer or a carrier-provided device?

Try to zoom a "high resolution" image on your phone - if your carrier transparently replaces it (mine does) then zooming makes it is pretty obvious that the quality has been altered. Or, even easier, just look at the file size and compare it to what is supposed to be on the web server.

My carrier also compresses HTML; doing that can break apps that expect their server-side HTML pages to be downloaded as-is by the client.

You should block this, as the logs it generates are just too dangerous. If they are doing this on your own computer, using a browser like Firefox with an extension that can block the Javascript to fetch the compressed versions of images or alternate HTML pages should work, just as it does for me. If it is a carrier-provided device, I would recommend not using their browser and installing another. I would not own a device where this could not be done.

Any carrier tampering with web pages should be treated as malicious, and all of the carriers should be treated as actively malicious in light of tracking scandals like CarrierIQ and Comcast's attacks on Bittorrent.

[valeriodean]

And yet again, Bo$$ proves his underdeveloped midgetbrain cannot comprehend any argument beyond childish ideas of "my dad is stronger than your dad". All Bo$$ ever does is present strawman arguments about how everyone else hates success, which he of course cannot substantiate in any way.

Fun forum game: try to find one Bo$$ post where he doesn't mention "basement dwellers" or how "everyone is jealous of Canonical".

Don't ask the impossible.
That said, I think that reading Bo$$ speaking about "fanatics" is funny by design. :-)

[chrisb]

It is a pretty reasonable assertion. If they didn't need the ability to relicense under other terms, they wouldn't require a copyright license agreement for any contributions to the project

Are there any situations in which a copyright license agreement is desirable even if you don't need the ability to relicense? Aren't there open source projects (Apache, Ubuntu, Gentoo, GCC) for which there is no alternative closed-source version, and yet those projects still require a contributor copyright agreement?

This is part of the business model for several Canonical projects and not that uncommon among other vendors as well. Whether this is acceptable to you or not is a different question but it is good to be aware of the implications of copyleft licensing + contributor license agreements especially for potential contributors.

Which Canonical projects are dual licensed as closed-source? Not "hypothetically-might-happen" (as in this case), but code that you can actually buy under a closed source license right now?

[dee.]

Umm you can assume they won't do so because of their track record of expressly not doing so and the lack of any indications that they will. They had plenty of opportunity to make the OS proprietary, the reason they haven't done so is that it would defeat the whole purpose of creating Ubuntu and alienate many of their user base and developers, not to mention they wouldn't be able to call their OS "free". There would need to be a very good reason for doing so, and so far I don't see how it would benefit them at all. (they don't seem adverse to sharing)

There already is a reason: carrier/hardware vendor relations - maybe some carrier doesn't want to offer GPLv3 software as a part of their phone OS, so Canonical can offer them a deal to give them a proprietary version of the display server. And if you speak of Canonical's track record... they have a track record of going back on their word, adding adware to the app launcher, etc... then there's the fact that the SmartScopes (or whatever they decide to call it tomorrow) server runs proprietary code, as does UbuntuOne on the server side. The reason given by Canonical is "we can't open our code because people might be able to compete with our service". So clearly Canonical doesn't have any problem with developing proprietary applications when it suits their "business plan".

This isn't directed at you dee, but I really don't understand all this Ubuntu/Canonical bashing. I've used 13.04 myself and it is fantastic, especially for beginners. I use OpenSUSE myself because I'm a fan of KDE and I can understand Unity not working for everyone but accusing Canonical of being "immoral" for not sharing every little backend tweak/code/icon for launchpad is ridiculous. They open sourced it when they really had no reason to first of all, so I'm not even sure that you even know what you are talking about but even if they didn't that does not make them immoral and slandering them like that reflects poorly on the Linux community.

I really can't wrap my brain around the idea that if Canonical does dodgy things and the Linux community calls them out for it, it somehow "reflects poorly on the Linux community". Believe me, I would like nothing better than being able to stop "bashing" Canonical, but that would require them to stop doing incredibly stupid and harmful things, like Mir and that launcher adware (whatever it's called today).

[chrisb]

You should block this, as the logs it generates are just too dangerous. If they are doing this on your own computer, using a browser like Firefox with an extension that can block the Javascript to fetch the compressed versions of images or alternate HTML pages should work, just as it does for me.

It is a transparent HTTP proxy so disabling Javascript doesn't help. Since they look at every HTTP request, there is no way to avoid logging, other than using a VPN and encrypting all data. Or use HTTPS Everywhere, but that will only help with web browsing, all of the apps will still use plain http. Every app and service leaks data to the network. The VPN solution would work but you might stand out - I would guess there are only a few people in a million who always use an encrypted VPN for all cell phone traffic.