Fedora 20 Moves Ahead With Wayland Tech Preview

[danielnez1]

You CANNOT including any such clause in a license since a license does not apply to a copyright holder. You don't seem to understand the legal basis or purpose of CLA at all. There are several Phoronix users who have complained about CLA in other projects as well but you seem to notice only one company apparently.

I understand them well enough, granted I'm not a lawyer. The point that I was original trying to make that you seem to either fail to understand or deliberately ignore is that there is nothing stopping anyone form using CLAs for their projects, as Red Hat have done in the past. Sure people cant retrospectively apply a CLA to prior work, but if the 3rd party code is under a permissive licence, what would stop someone from dynamically linking to the code and releasing their larger project under a CLA?

My point is that you are essentially saying that if someone does something we disapprove of, we should let them off the hook because someone else might do something similar. That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. If we used that policy consistently then we could never criticize anyone for anything, heck our entire legal system would break down.

It is Canonicals, Red Hats, yours and my prerogative to use CLAs if we wish, weather that is a moral choice is another mater and I feel is part of a broader issue over open source licensing. As you alluded Canonical have done far worse with Mir and the FUD against Wayland they initially spewed.

[RahulSundaram]

I understand them well enough, granted I'm not a lawyer. The point that I was original trying to make that you seem to either fail to understand or deliberately ignore is that there is nothing stopping anyone form using CLAs for their projects, as Red Hat have done in the past. Sure people cant retrospectively apply a CLA to prior work, but if the 3rd party code is under a permissive licence, what would stop someone from dynamically linking to the code and releasing their larger project under a CLA?

You don't have to be a lawyer but you do need a basic understanding of copyright and licensing since we are talking about license agreements and many of your statements are clearly based on a lack of that understanding. I would suggest that you read a good primer (SFLC has one) before you defend it. I will not withhold my criticisms of the current situation based on a future possibility. If what you suggest occurs, that project deserves to be criticized for it as much as one criticizes Mir right now. What matters is the priniciple that licensing agreements shouldn't be asymmetrical. Not specific projects or companies.

[TheBlackCat]

It is Canonicals, Red Hats, yours and my prerogative to use CLAs if we wish, weather that is a moral choice is another mater and I feel is part of a broader issue over open source licensing.

They are free to make their choices, no one has ever claimed otherwise. But we are also free to judge them on those choices and talk about our opinions.

But I fail to see how this has anything to do with your argument or my reply. Whether they have a legal right to do it or not doesn't change the fact that it doesn't make any sense to let someone off the hook for something because someone else might do it at some point in the future.

[mrugiero]

I understand them well enough, granted I'm not a lawyer. The point that I was original trying to make that you seem to either fail to understand or deliberately ignore is that there is nothing stopping anyone form using CLAs for their projects, as Red Hat have done in the past. Sure people cant retrospectively apply a CLA to prior work, but if the 3rd party code is under a permissive licence, what would stop someone from dynamically linking to the code and releasing their larger project under a CLA?

What you seem to fail to understand is that it should get criticized when it happens. We don't have a minority report telling us it will happen, to do so now.

[danielnez1]

What you seem to fail to understand is that it should get criticized when it happens. We don't have a minority report telling us it will happen, to do so now.

I don't have any issue with people criticising CLAs but I don't see the point in nit-picking when they are used by multiple organisations and anyway playing devils advocate, at least is in black and white what they may do with the code, as opposed to subverting Wayland like what Canonical did, which I believe is far more devious than a CLA.

[mrugiero]

I don't have any issue with people criticising CLAs but I don't see the point in nit-picking when they are used by multiple organisations and anyway playing devils advocate, at least is in black and white what they may do with the code, as opposed to subverting Wayland like what Canonical did, which I believe is far more devious than a CLA.

They are used by multiple organizations? AFAIK, Canonical uses it, Red Hat used it, anyone else? I saw something like that related to Novell, but it turned out to be just MS saying they are allowed to use any MS patented technology they implement, which has nothing to do with taking rights from developers.
Yes, it shows what they may do with the code, but the thing is, it also shows what they want to do with the code. Otherwise, they wouldn't care about such a thing, and wouldn't hurt their own chances of getting contributions by making someone sign it. So, this means as long as there is someone willing to pay them for the right to make proprietary derivatives, Canonical will do it, while nobody else can. This is the meaning of an asymmetrical license, after all, the devs can't do what Canonical can, and no user can either. This is unfair.

As for subverting, I don't really get what you mean (I mean, literally, not as not getting the idea but not getting the meaning of "subvert", and Google's translator doesn't help). Can you rephrase it, please?

They did Mir for the CLA. If it wasn't for starting a CLA project, they could just carry a patch set for a wayland branch.

They could do both things, since MIT license allows you to ship it with custom licensed code. Which in turns means, they can close the source of Wayland (as anyone can) and in turn ask for the right to be the only ones allowed to closed the source for any contribution made on top of that. At least, that's how I understand it, if someone else with sharper knowledge of laws corrects me, I'll listen.

[RahulSundaram]

They could do both things, since MIT license allows you to ship it with custom licensed code. Which in turns means, they can close the source of Wayland (as anyone can) and in turn ask for the right to be the only ones allowed to closed the source for any contribution made on top of that. At least, that's how I understand it, if someone else with sharper knowledge of laws corrects me, I'll listen.

They could create a fork of Wayland but Wayland itself would remain under the MIT license and if they indeed fork, the reason for doing so would be more blatantly obvious as a non technical decision considering that Wayland only defines a base protocol and can be extended as necessary without forking.

[Vim_User]

They could create a fork of Wayland but Wayland itself would remain under the MIT license

The fork would also be MIT licensed, forking does not change magically the license. Of course there would be no point at all in forking Wayland.

[mrugiero]

MIT is not asymmetrical, so it is not Canonical approved They wanted somethig like CLA/GPL3

My point wasn't to just use MIT. Was to fork the MIT licensed codebase, and expect signing the CLA for further contributions, while making them GPL. The MIT license allows for distribution with custom licensed projects. Also, I interpreted it as a kind of "preserve the copyright, distribute with whichever license you like", which allowed to relicense this codebase as GPL and then adding the CLA for new contributions makes obtaining the asymmetry trivial. If I understand Rahul correctly, this assumption was wrong.

[intellivision]

They are used by multiple organizations? AFAIK, Canonical uses it, Red Hat used it, anyone else? I saw something like that related to Novell, but it turned out to be just MS saying they are allowed to use any MS patented technology they implement, which has nothing to do with taking rights from developers.

The FSF uses CLAs too, much to Honton's, I mean Funkstar's chagrin.