On Thu, Oct 31, 2013 at 10:14:06AM -0400, Barry Warsaw wrote: > Actually, contributing to Upstart does not require copyright assignment (as > for example, would contributing to an FSF-owned GNU project). Instead, it > requires a Contributor License Agreement be signed: > > http://www.canonical.com/contributors
Quoting from the PDF linked from that page ("Canonical Individual Contributor License Agreement" for individual contributors): Based on the grant of rights in Sections 2.1 and 2.2, if We include Your Contribution in a Material, We may license the Contribution under any license, including copyleft, permissive, commercial, or proprietary licenses. In other words, Canonical gets the right to take a free software contribution and make it proprietary. The contributors gets to own the software, and can continue releasing it as free software, but can't prevent Canonical from making non-free versions of it. I don't find that an acceptable situation. Compare that to the FSF, where they guarantee the contributed software will always remain free software. (Also, not all GNU projects require copyright assignment.) Both Canonical and the FSF want you to give them something, but the FSF promises to keep it free, and indeed, goes to great lengths to define (in the copyright assignment contract) what it means for the software to be free: it's not just "whatever license the FSF wants to use". Disclaimer: I've not assigned any copyrights to the FSF, I have merely read around the debates on this and listened to many "Free as in freedom" oggcast episodes with Bradley Kuhn and Karen Sandler (http://faif.us/). -- http://www.cafepress.com/trunktees -- geeky funny T-shirts http://gtdfh.branchable.com/ -- GTD for hackers -- 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/20131031181031.GG4670@holywood