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

[Dimitri John Ledkov]

On 10 January 2015 at 18:19, Michael Banck <mbanck at debian.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 05, 2015 at 10:01:49AM -0500, Stephen M. Webb wrote:
>> Maybe.  I contributed small patches to GCC for years before taking the
>> leap and signing my soul over to the FSF so I could get them to accept
>> more substantial pieces of work (and they could relicense it to third
>> parties to earn revenue).
>
> My understanding of the FSF/GNU copyright assignment is that in their
> part of the legal paperwork, they pledge to only relicense the code
> under a license of similar spirit.  So the above is FUD AFAICT.
>
> Now if you don't trust the FSF that much that you think GPLv4 will be a
> proprietary license, then maybe your above statement makes sense.
>
> OTOH, if you haven't understood the FSF/GNU copyright assignment, it
> might explain why you seem to be oblivious to other people's
> reservations with the Canonical CLA.

There is a wide amount of people who have the view that GPLv3 was not
in spirit of GPLv2 and should have been given a new/different name
instead.

Also the GFDL 1.3 is totally not in-spirit of previous GFDL revisions
and allows re-licence under CC-BY-SA 3.0 for a subset of 1.2 licensed
things.

Similarly the whole "Invariant Sections" bits are completely not
in-spirit of the free software.

Out of all the things that FSF do, "publishing revisions of their
licenses of similar spirit" is that bit that they consistently fail to
deliver.

Above points however are simply against FSF and that it's own
copyright assignment is just as horrible.

GNU project however, does not require copyright assignment to FSF, it
requires a copyright assignment to an entity. E.g. GNU bazaar-ng
holder is Canonical.

-- 
Regards,

Dimitri.