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  • #41
    Originally posted by Honton View Post
    Your claim. Many disagree. You might as well claim that Software Freedom is irrelevant.
    So, naturally you're also against any GPL-licensed software that only has one developer? Because that's the same thing, really. In practice at least. A sole developer can choose to change the license or dual-license their code, just like a CLA allows.

    CLA doesn't take away your software freedom. If the software is Free, it will stay Free, you'll always be able to fork it and make your own version without any CLA - no one can retroactively change licenses of already released versions, CLA or not.

    And oh, if we're talking about software freedom, you could just go to the FSF page where Stallman writes that dual-licensing and selling a proprietary version of a GPL-licensed software is an entirely acceptable business model.

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    • #42
      Originally posted by matzipan View Post
      Care to explain? I'm not being offensive here, I am just curious, because in my current understanding, it doesn't.
      GTK+ is sort of seperate project, but actually it is not. Most of the patches are from GNOME developers. You rarely see anyone else contributing towards it. Replacing X with Wayland means a lot of work as X is way more than just a display server. If you could assume that everyone uses Wayland and pretend that X is a dead-end, then you deprecate the X-specific stuff and go for Wayland. However, you need to deal with the transition period. So at this time various developers are splitting off X bits and sharing that stuff between X and Wayland. This takes quite a bit of time.

      People seem to assume that a toolkit just needs to include a new display server backend. This is far from true. E.g. Wayland does not do anything like xrandr. Feel like changing your resolution in a similar way across desktops? Good luck! Now instead of assuming just Wayland for GNOME, GTK+ cannot. So though we'd like to deprecate X-specific/assuming APIs, in reality you do want your applications to work across distributions. So you need to spend time on figuring out what should be left with X, what should be shared together with X and Wayland, but also guess what Mir is going to do.

      Now aside from just GTK+, various applications do have X-specific things in them. E.g. they call X-specific GTK API. That's actually a bug (should only do that when they're running on X), but, well, real world is sometimes way different than real life.

      We're ignoring Mir as much as we can (quite easy as it is so distrobution specific + focussed on one distribution), but a lot of developers do work on parts of the stack that must work across distributions and toolkits. If you work on that level, it is far from easy.

      For Mir, it won't do as much as X does. Similar to Wayland. However, for Wayland we decide ourselves what the replacements should be, or what to share with X. For Mir, there is a total lack of clarify (logical IMO as despite the suggestions by some people here, Wayland is far ahead). That's not good if you want the lower bits to work across distributions. There is XMir, but that reuses X. It won't tell anyone about Mir.

      Now it is pretty cool on this forum to suggest that "XXX just hates Ubuntu". Meanwhile, we're spending time to ensure that things work. E.g. you can input easily in the same way in Chinese/Korean in X+Wayland+Mir. For more detailed explanation I'd have to ask the real developers. But in brief: Wayland already results in deprecations in GTK+ and changes in various toolkits (clutter). But also changes in gnome-shell, mutter, gnome-settings-daemon, gnome-shell-extensions, gnome-control-center, colord, etc. Quite a bit more than just a new backend in GTK+!

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      • #43
        Originally posted by erendorn View Post
        Original contributor keeps its copyright, so in order to make some under-CLA software proprietary, Canonical would have to convince every single contributor to revoke the GPL license of their contribution. It works both ways: if a contributor would change its mind and revoke the GPL license of their contrib, you would still have Canonical's GPL license.

        Sharing copyrights with one or multiple third parties pretty much reinforces the guaranties that something stays under a free software license (but not exclusively under such a license).
        Why do you think you sign a CLA?!? Canonical doesn't have to do that at all. That's why they have that CLA. They can sell a proprietary version without any issues. At which point that proprietary version can have any changes applied to it. Obviously there will still be some free software version which stays under the same license.

        Anyway, once a contributor contributes under GPL, it stays GPL.

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        • #44
          Originally posted by bkor View Post
          Why do you think you sign a CLA?!? Canonical doesn't have to do that at all. That's why they have that CLA. They can sell a proprietary version without any issues. At which point that proprietary version can have any changes applied to it. Obviously there will still be some free software version which stays under the same license.

          Anyway, once a contributor contributes under GPL, it stays GPL.
          Do you think the Apache Foundation is also secretly planning to create closed source versions of its software? How about Gentoo? Are they evil for having a CLA? And QT project must be even worse, not only do they have a CLA, they really do dual-licence the code!

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          • #45
            Originally posted by bkor View Post
            Why do you think you sign a CLA?!? Canonical doesn't have to do that at all. That's why they have that CLA. They can sell a proprietary version without any issues. At which point that proprietary version can have any changes applied to it. Obviously there will still be some free software version which stays under the same license.

            Anyway, once a contributor contributes under GPL, it stays GPL.
            I think the reason a lot of people are upset with CLA agreements is that there is a chance it won't stay GPL exclusively. Yes, once the code has been released with the GPL, that code will always be GPL, but the CLA means that Canonical can make a nonGPL release.

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            • #46
              Originally posted by chrisb View Post
              Do you think the Apache Foundation is also secretly planning to create closed source versions of its software? How about Gentoo? Are they evil for having a CLA? And QT project must be even worse, not only do they have a CLA, they really do dual-licence the code!
              Yeah, but QT when it was run by Trolltech has already abused the CLA. Do you remember when Nexuiz abused its CLA? I do. Darkplaces anyone? Come on, don't be naive.

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              • #47
                Originally posted by duby229 View Post
                I think the reason a lot of people are upset with CLA agreements is that there is a chance it won't stay GPL exclusively. Yes, once the code has been released with the GPL, that code will always be GPL, but the CLA means that Canonical can make a nonGPL release.
                and Drop all GPL support

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                • #48
                  Originally posted by LinuxGamer View Post
                  and Drop all GPL support
                  That's possible of course, but I think it unlikely. The backlash for them would be irreparable.

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                  • #49
                    Originally posted by duby229 View Post
                    That's possible of course, but I think it unlikely. The backlash for them would be irreparable.
                    If there's one thing Canonical has proven it can do very well, it's ignoring irreparable backlashes. They rival Apple in their ability to be oblivious to consumer dissatisfaction.

                    Comment


                    • #50
                      Originally posted by bkor View Post
                      Anyway, once a contributor contributes under GPL, it stays GPL.
                      I've made some research and it is not that clear. In theory you could possibly revoke the GPL license of your own work. Like, retroactively.
                      It's never been tried in court, and chances are that it wouldn't work, but this is not so clear.
                      That's why copyright agreement with a non-commercial third party (with the FSF for example) is a good thing.
                      Or a copyright agreement where you give any third party the right to relicense the work in GPL only (no possible abuse).

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