Contributor agreement

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Martin Pool writes:

 > Clause 2 does ensure you can do what you want with your own
 > contributions, including distributing them to others under your choice
 > of terms.

The point is that the right of distribution is not transitive.  This
means that if a third party wants to use "Me's" software in their own
software, they have to tell their clients to get it from Me.  They
have no right to redistribute it.  And Me can no longer grant it:

 > >>> 2. Canonical grants to Me a world-wide, non-exclusive,
 > >>>    royalty-free and perpetual right to use, copy, modify,
 > >>>    communicate and make available to the public (including
 > >>>    without limitation via the Internet) and distribute, in each
 > >>>    case in an original or modified form, the Assigned
 > >>>    Contributions as I wish.

Note the very pointed absence of the right to sublicense.  The "as I
wish" part *might* cover that, but then again, given the long, very
specific and quite comprehensive list of rights explicitly granted, a
court might conclude that the omission is deliberate, and "as I wish"
applies to, say, field of application (nuclear weapons, DRM, and other
such threats to the very fabric of reality...).

This clause does need to be revisited.

 > >   * MAJOR ISSUE: This requirement is open to abuse, as anyone could
 > >     send such an email with my name in it without my knowledge and it
 > >     is easy to falsify sender's addresses in email as huge amounts of
 > >     spam can prove.
 > 
 > As Karl(?) mentioned, if a miscreant forges mail purporting to be from
 > you, you obviously are not accountable for what they say.

No, but Canonical won't pay my legal fees, court costs, and any
incidental costs of proving I sent no such mail.  And I personally
would have great difficulty proving that, since I don't habitually
sign my email.

If Canonical is using my own code to compete with me, it might be very
difficult to extract damages in such a case (unless the miscreant was
a Canonical employee).

It's one thing for the FSF, with its shoestring budget, to impose
almost all costs on the contributor.  It's another for Canonical,
which proposes to make money one way or another from the contribution,
to do that.  I suspect many contributors who will put up with the
former will take quite a dim view of the latter.