[gentoo-dev] Re: non-Gentoo stuff in our CVS

[Duncan]

Mike Frysinger posted <200410081023.20888.vapier@g.o>, excerpted
below,  on Fri, 08 Oct 2004 10:23:20 -0400:

> the reiserfs peeps require any patch you send to them to be completely
> signed off ... you have to give them copyright/license/everything over any
> patch you send them

That's because they want the flexibility of being able to do private
licenses as well.  It's possible that they can't make public certain mods
they may do for the US DOD for instance, and could easily be other
"private" contracts.  With their own code, they have that flexibility
since they are the owner.  With submitted patches, that isn't the case,
unless they become the owner of those patches as well.

Of course, most here probably know more about the Zynot fork history and
allegations than I do.  I did a bit of study into it, including reading
the why fork and etc. docs on his site, and what struck me was how he kept
alleging Gentoo (well, core and DRobbins) had a private for-profit hidden
agenda, while at the /same/ time, he was busy taking advantage of the GPL
licensing (and deliberate policy choice, I expect) of anything Gentoo to
do his fork.  It would have been pretty stupid, I thought, for that
license to be chosen, if there /were/ such a hidden agenda, since it not
only allowed forking as he was doing, but prevented taking things private
if they /wanted/ to.

Of course the last clause doesn't hold if Gentoo insists on transfer of
copyright, as it could then be taken private.  Not that I expect it will
happen, but the insistence on rights assignment, not only GPL licensing
for any code contributed, /does/ leave open both that possibility, and the
question, for those wishing to make such allegations.

There may be those who prefer GPL and for which that license forms much of
their motivation.  These sorts of folks take comfort in for instance the
fact that it'd be practically impossible to change the Linux kernel code
license.  There are to many parts owned by to many people, and getting
them all to agree would be essentially impossible, as would rewriting the
parts from those who don't agree, because the code is so interwoven.  When
a single entity demands ownership of all code, that barrier to taking it
private disappears.  Of course, as with the SSH code which went private,
it can then be forked, but some (including myself) prefer preventing the
possibility of it ever going proprietary-ware in the first place, if at
all possible.

As others have said, I'm sure this has been rehashed before, and I'm not
going to change any minds or policy, particularly since I'm not a Gentoo
dev myself.  However, I feel strongly enough about this to react, anyway. 
A couple of the guys on my ISP Unix group keep trying to talk me into
going BSD, but I'm really not all that interested, because while I agree
there's a place for BSD style licenses, particularly in code with a goal
of becoming a reference standard, a large part of my motivation is the
fact that I'm supporting a code-returning-to-the-community model, and
there'd simply not be the personal drive behind it, were an MS or an Apple
(or anyone else) to be able to use my supported community code in a
distributed binary and not return their changed back to the pool I'm
supporting.  That's why I'm here, not on xBSD.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." --
Benjamin Franklin



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