On 19.05.2016 18:28, David Cramblett wrote: > If you read this (from Linux kernel link provided): > > |(d) I understand and agree that this project and the contribution are > public and that a record of the contribution (including all personal > information I submit with it, including my sign-off) is maintained > indefinitely and may be redistributed consistent with this project or > the open source license(s) involved.| > > > It's kind of splitting hairs to say they don't require CLA, "it's a > Certificate of Origin". It's essentially accomplishing the same goal.
No, definitively not. With a CLA, I give up my copyright. I have no rights on the code submitted anymore and the entity that I had to transfer my copyrights to can do with my contribution as it pleases. They can even go closed source. The (d) point you cited above just informs me that anyone can look up my contribution as it will be publicly available indefinitely. > The developer is agreeing that the patch belongs to the project and may > be redistributed indefinitely. Where does it say that? > I'm not particularly concerned one way or the other. If any evil person > or company tries to convert a useful OSS project into a pay-for software > (or do other disruptive things), the community is going to fork the > project and move on, e.g. LibreOffice, MariaDB, etc. There is no easy way to prohibit this. Look at The Gimp, for example: There are dozens of outlets on the internet that _sell_ precompiled versions, sometimes "enhanced" with add ware and sometimes even under the "Photoshop" label. As a side note, even the current infrastructure supplier of BackupPC, sourceforge.net, is known to do such things. Just google "sourceforge grabs gimp". Now, the GPL does not prohibit to sell software. It demands that you have to make the source code available and that you can not mix GPL with non GPL software (oversimplified, I know). But you actually are allowed to charge for compilation, media, documentation, support and so on. How can an open source project defend against the misuse of their project? Mostly by making sure the source code stays open source. Try to attract as many contributors as possible so the number of copyright holders make it improbable that the source is taken over. In the case of BackupPC, the risk of misuse is small: The target audience are system administrators who will not download BackupPC from some shady operation for a handful of megabucks if they can install it from their OS repository for free. So another target would be to closely cooperate with OS package maintainers in order to make the inclusion of BackupPC as hassle free for them as possible. Most OS packagers carry patches for the packages the maintain. Some of the patches are distribution specific, some are bug fixes, some are even functional extensions. And all package maintainers would prefer if they would not have to carry these patches because these may break and the maintainer then has to redo them for every new release of the upstream project. So, harvesting these patches and incorporate them into the main BackupPC source makes sure we stay in the distribution. Another thing most OS packagers do is accepting bug reports. We should harvest these bug reports and fix the issues in our source code. The more bug reports a maintainer can close with a "fixed upstream" notice, the better the reputation of a project is and the larger the chances of a project to stay in the distribution (or even get a special exposure in the distribution) are. With kind regards Stefan Peter -- A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail? (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style for details) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mobile security can be enabling, not merely restricting. Employees who bring their own devices (BYOD) to work are irked by the imposition of MDM restrictions. Mobile Device Manager Plus allows you to control only the apps on BYO-devices by containerizing them, leaving personal data untouched! https://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/304595813;131938128;j _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki: http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
