On Wed, Jul 19, 2017 at 09:36:25PM +0200, Zygmunt Krynicki wrote: > > fundamental technology. That is, Snappy is GPL v3 for everyone except > > Canonical, but effectively BSD/MIT-style for Canonical _including_ > > outside contributions. If we would decide to invest heavily in snaps, [...] > I understand but I honestly think we are at a disadvantage here. If > snapd is successful anyone could fork it and continue development around > a version that doesn't need a CLA. That would put pressure on Ubuntu > which could not use those improvements. (see the tail of this reply for > more licensing observations). We prefer to work with upstreams rather than making forks, though. I guess that could be one approach but it doesn't really seem great for anyone, especially not in the interest of universality. > > this is a pretty big stumbling block. And I don't think just for > > Fedora. If you _really_ want to make Snappy a cross-distro success, > > it's important to remedy this. In my non-lawyerly view, even > > relicensing under MIT for _everyone_ would at least be more fair. I > > personally think committing to GPL for everyone, Canonical included, > > would be better. > I think some form of CLA is acceptable and it's unfair to say that > projects should not require CLAs. At Canonical we often contribute to > projects under CLAs simply because that's how they are developed (e.g. > golang itself) and we recognize the asymmetry of a single contribution > over a large investment to develop something in the first place. Lastly > many people just don't mind. I also recognize that some people *do* mind > and reject all but ultra-pure FOSS ideas and I'm okay with that too. I'm not rejecting all CLAs. I find this particular one troubling when used in conjunction with a copyleft license like GPL. It puts Canonical in a particular privileged place to take the project to an "open core" proprietary model. I don't think that Canonical is likely to do that *now*, but the future is hard to be certain about. (And if that's not a concern, why is it so important to have the CLA phrased this way?) It's perfectly fine if Canonical wants to do this. You're right that the initial investment in code is a big deal. I'm not saying it's wrong; just that it's a big barrier to large-scale adoption in Fedora and probably in other distros as well. The Harmony CLA template Canonical uses has _other_ options for the relevant sections, like promising to use licenses in the same family, licenses approved the FSF, or just a list of possible licenses. If the goal is to make a universal system, it seems like a better choice. (Or, like I said, to use something other than GPL, which removes the asymmetry.) -- Matthew Miller <mattdm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Fedora Project Leader _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
