Bzr development stopped

[Brian de Alwis]

On 13-Sep-2012, at 10:28 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> I don't understand your point in the context of this subthread.

It was about the deeper context as to why Canonical requested copyright assignment.  And they *used to* request copyright assignment.  The contributor agreement I signed (v2.5) says very clearly:

	1. I hereby assign to Canonical with full title guarantee all
	copyright now or in the future subsisting in any part of the
	world in any Assigned Contributions. […]

Looks like they've since changed to a Harmony license, which does not ask for copyright assignment, but Section 2.3 provides Canonical the ability to relicense the contribution.  I don't remember hearing about this change of agreement though.

	http://www.canonical.com/contributors
	http://www.canonical.com/sites/default/files/active/images/Canonical-HA-CLA-ANY-I.pdf

That's a big change!

Brian.


On 13-Sep-2012, at 10:28 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> Brian de Alwis writes:
>> On 12-Sep-2012, at 1:44 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> 
>>> So what?  That's not the Canonical contributor agreement, which
>>> involves no transfer of copyright.
>> 
>> It is a consequence of the GPL which considers linking (such as
>> with plugins) to invoke a derivative work.  By having ownership
>> over bzr, Canonical can grant an alternative license to itself
>> (and others) to allow linking to proprietary extensions without
>> invoking the GPL.
> 
> I don't understand your point in the context of this subthread.  We
> are discussing Canonical's contributor agreement as a (non-) inhibitor
> of contributions.  Matthieu proposed the attempted bzr/hg merger as an
> example where we know this had a major effect.  I'm explaining why
> "Canonical owns the copyright" means this is *not* a relevant example.