Code written by the wrong people

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

On Mon, Apr 2, 2012 at 5:02 PM, Ben Finney <ben+bazaar at benfinney.id.au> wrote:

> The paragraph you chose to quote, above, was not giving reason. The
> reason given was in most of the message that you snipped and chose not
> to respond to.

And I'm sure that the Canonical developers know those reasons, if only
because you've been at pains to explain them on several occasions
before.  But it's the lawyers, or their boss, that you need to
convince, not the developers.

> To put it more briefly, then: Code which people want in Bazaar, which
> Canonical already has all the legal permission they need to include and
> distribute,

Granted.  The lawyers think Canonical needs more than permission; why,
I don't know.  I am familiar, however, with the "risk to the project"
rationale that RMS puts forward, and I posted a few words to address
that.  Your arguments do not.

> is under a cloud of uncertainly

Nonsense.  Under an assignment or contributor agreement policy, it's
clear what the status of that code is: not distributed by the project
as part of the core product but you're free to get it yourself (and
may even be distributed as Ubuntu packages in many cases).   That's
true of a lot of code. Sure, to some extent such a policy is a PITA,
and arguably, it's a bad idea.  But unclear, it is not.

> solely because of this self-imposed obstacle.

A self-imposed obstacle which the seminal legal minds in free software
(ie, RMS and his lawyer) have also chosen to impose on several core
GNU projects.  Many other projects (pretty much any project big enough
to have a $PROJECT Foundation, and not a few smaller than that) also
require either an assignment or a contributor agreement.

> That's an argument for removing the obstacle, and it's one which the
> Bazaar developers, as people being inconvenienced by this policy and
> with presumably more influence than outsiders, are in a position to
> present to Canonical.

Sure, and I know that some Canonical employees have at the very least
presented the argument to their bosses, with little effect at the
time.  As far as I know, on this list you're singing to the preacher
(or however that old saw goes).  My point is simply that talking about
what unlawyered projects do isn't going to help the case, nor will
overstating the valid points that you do make.  You should avoid that.