previously on this list Ben Hutchings contributed: > > > 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. > > > > But I saw today that this paragraph goes on with: > > > > As a condition on the exercise of this right, We agree to also > > license the Contribution under the terms of the license or > > licenses which We are using for the Material on the Submission > > Date. > > > > My understanding (as a non-expert on legalese en_*) is, that Canonical > > would only be allowed to re-license the Contribution under a > > dual-license scheme, with (a) the original license, and (b) > > $whatever-they-want. > [...] > > Yes, but that says nothing about the rest of the program that it's a > part of, nor that they will continue to distribute the Contribution. > Since the contributor, retaining copyright, can give that license to > anyone anyway, this condition doesn't appear to have any meaningful > effect. > > Ben.
I don't see why this should affect the decision at all personally especially far less than less co-operative upstreams though perhaps a pure BSD license could be seen as a free-er plus point. It basically means they have reserved the right that they may never use but put in jut in case likely for other projects to stop contributing or publishing the source of their work to the project but continue to use the communities past work. The community could even then decide that just canonical was not allowed to use any of their changes from then on whilst still benefiting from Canonical's past work. At the end of the day whatever increases the chance of code being done for good reasons and the good of the community is what is important and forcing publication may?? help twist the arms of the less important contributors but also hinders that likelihood in reduced initial take up anyway possibly including partial release. Apache's BSD based and Googles BSD based licenses and many others would all allow this, what has been and is going to be contributed in a constructive and forth coming way for the good of all is what is important. -- _______________________________________________________________________ 'Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface' (Doug McIlroy) In Other Words - Don't design like polkit or systemd _______________________________________________________________________ -- 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/304170.20633...@smtp139.mail.ir2.yahoo.com