On 2012-02-25, Ben Hutchings <b...@decadent.org.uk> wrote: > Of the others, I've never got the impression that they're actively > soliciting contributions from outside the company, though I could be > wrong. I think free software developers rarely quibble over licences if
Qt is now actively trying to get contributions from outside the company. And is getting quite many contributions. Qt has worked quite a bit to get their CLA acceptable to the community. - for example, at the desktop summit where the CLA was brand new, KDE developers was actually discouraged from signing it at that time because there was too much wrong with it. It got fixed, and the same people said in october that they weren't discouraging the CLA any longer (and it now was up to the individual wether or not they like the concepts of CLA's to sign it) And to explain why the CLA is needed. - Qt has already commercial customers and obligations they need to fulfil (mostly from before going LGPL and before trying to get contributions from outside) - Qt also has obligations to the KDE Free Qt foundation that they need to be able to fulfil, should that day come Qt also has a 'stop gap' from going completely rogue, the KDE Free Qt Foundation, who can relicense Qt into a very liberal BSD license. > So, why do people pick on Canonical? Partly, I think, as a reaction to > Mark Shuttleworth's repeated arguing for copyright assignment/CLA/ > Harmony. Partly because Canonical often presents Ubuntu and related > software as being community projects while this licencing approach can > be seen to undermine that. And partly because they haven't made it clear why they need the copyright assignment. And partly because amongst people who has read canonicals copyright assignments, they are part of the more evil of the copyright assignments. Rather than signing a copyright assignment, I_would prefer just license my code going into such projects under MIT/X11. That's less paperwork, and effectively gives enough rights for the receiver to commercialize on it. I have - with a checkbox - signed the Qt CLA and contributed two small fixes. I haven't yet stood in the actual situation of trying to contribute code to one of Canonical's projects. Some of my friends have, and refused the canonical copyright assignments. Their work is now carried as distribution patches in ubuntu. /Sune -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/slrnjkhgln.p7v.nos...@sshway.ssh.pusling.com