[Ubuntu-bugcontrol] Please, consider reflecting on the Canonical Contributor Agreement

[Dimitri John Ledkov]

On 2 January 2015 at 12:37, Scott Kitterman <ubuntu at kitterman.com> wrote:
> On Monday, December 29, 2014 01:09:57 PM Stephen M. Webb wrote:
>> Fact is, when it comes time for me to accept or reject a contribution, I
>> must outright reject any from an author who has not proven good will, and
>> that proof is the CLA.
>
> Fact is you're required to do so by your employer, so no judgment at all on
> your part is required.  Your thesis would make sense if it required a
> reciprocal grant of rights.  It doesn't.  It demands more from the contributor
> in terms of rights than it granted (I'd find the paperwork annoying, but
> reasonable if that were not the case).
>
> Fact is prior to the CLA, the type of abuses you're worried about didn't
> happen in the project.  In fact, Canonical threw away perfectly good code
> because some people didn't want to retroactively agree to the original
> copyright assignment.
>
> Fact is it's causing external groups to stay away from contributing to
> Canonical  projects (which contributes to the tautology that the CLA is
> reasonable because Canonical is the primary/sole contributor).  If you want a
> specific example, the CLA is the only reason SDDM is the KDM replacement in
> Plasma 5 and not LightDM.
>
> Canonical is free to set the rules for contributions to its projects however
> it wants, but I think you misunderstand why there is a CLA.  For Ubuntu (the
> Linux distribution) there's no CLA and it works fine.
>

A number of high-profile employees have left Canonical because of CLA.

-- 
Regards,

Dimitri.