Upstart 0.5.0, /proc, and telinit

[Kevin Hunter]

Preface my following response with the fact that I'm not an Upstart
developer, merely an "interested end-user" of this project.

At 7:44am -0500 on Mon, 23 Feb 2009, Scott James Remnant wrote:
> On Mon, 2009-02-23 at 13:14 +0100, Mark Rosenstand wrote:
>> Is this the only thing that keeps upstart from working on non-initrd
>> systems? Seems it didn't make it into 0.5.1 :(
>
> Nobody has supplied a patch.

I can't speak for others, but I objected to assigning the copyright to
someone else.  At a first glance of "Would you be willing to adjust the
patch and assign copyright to Canonical?" sounds like "Give us your
work."  To be blunt, if I wrote it, why should you profit? Even if only
in the "Free" sense?

However, after I actually RTFM, these two points alleviated my gut reaction:

-----------
5. Canonical grants back to you a non-exclusive, royalty-free, and
perpetual right to use, modify, and distribute the Assigned
Contributions as you wish.

6. Canonical will make the Assigned Contributions available under a
"Free Software Licence", according to the definition of that term
published by the Free Software Foundation.  Such a licence will, at
minimum, permit people receiving the software, without payment of a
royalty to Canonical, to use, modify and redistribute under the same
licence.  Canonical may also make the Assigned Contributions available
under other license terms.
-----------

Since I would likely release personal work under a Free software
license, these would satisfy me.

However, I see no mention of attribution.  I appreciate seeing who a
project's major contributors are, either on a webpage, or in some file
in the code repo. Call me conceited, but if I were a major contributor
of a project, either past or present, I'd expect the same.

In short, lacking a good argument not to be, I'm comfortable with the
license, modulo the fact that there is no item to guarantee recognition.
For some of us, especially in these "lay-off times", recognition of our
contributions is the difference between a job and no-job.

Kevin