| 1 |
On Sun, 2011-09-25 at 20:54 +0100, Stroller wrote: |
| 2 |
> The end users do not give a monkey's uncle about the CLA. They just |
| 3 |
> want to use the software, and our distro already provides Sun Java |
| 4 |
> binaries, Unreal Tournament and stuff under all sorts of licenses. If |
| 5 |
> people want to use it, and it's in the package manager, then they |
| 6 |
> will. You are very much an exception, IMO, taking ethical exception to |
| 7 |
> Canonical's CLA. |
| 8 |
|
| 9 |
I think the important thing, for me anyway, is not the general user |
| 10 |
community, but the "open source" development community. Most of those |
| 11 |
people reluctant to sign their code over to another organization. Let's |
| 12 |
say, for example, that Linus Torvalds goes into another one of his "Your |
| 13 |
desktop environment sucks!" tirades and starts creating a bunch of |
| 14 |
patches to Unity. I somehow doubt he's going to add to that "and here |
| 15 |
are some patches and by the way you can have complete copyright to it." |
| 16 |
Or what if Red Hat designates some of their programmers to help make |
| 17 |
Unity integrate better with Fedora, but wants to push those changes |
| 18 |
upstream (like a good free software citizen). I somehow doubt Red Hat |
| 19 |
is going to want to pay their employees to write code and turn over |
| 20 |
ownership of it to Canonical. I can just see the press release now: "Red |
| 21 |
Hat and Canonical Announce New Software License Agreement". Huh? What? |
| 22 |
But it's *free* software!? |
| 23 |
> |
| 24 |
> Unity is GPL. It can always be forked. |
| 25 |
|
| 26 |
Yeah, but not everyone is going to want to fork an entire software |
| 27 |
project just to contribute some code and retain the rights to their own |
| 28 |
code. Say for example someone is really passionate about accessibility |
| 29 |
and wants to contribute to make desktop accessibility better, but |
| 30 |
doesn't want to sign a CLA? They're not going to fork just for that. |
| 31 |
No want wants "Unity-fork with accessibility patches" they want "Unity |
| 32 |
with improved accessibility". This is why large community-lead free |
| 33 |
software projects like Linux, KDE, and GNOME rarely have forks aside |
| 34 |
from a few corporate-sponsored forks to fill a niche (e.g. Android). |
| 35 |
One could argue that Unity *is* a corporate-sponsored fork (of GNOME) to |
| 36 |
fill a niche. |
| 37 |
|
| 38 |
-a |
Archives