[Solar-general] Canonical, Ltd. Finally On Record: Seeking Open Core

[Pablo Manuel Rizzo]

Canonical, Ltd. Finally On Record: Seeking Open Core

Sunday 17 October 2010 by Bradley M. Kuhn


 I've written before<http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/02/01/copyright-not-all-equal.html>about
my deep skepticism regarding the true motives of Canonical, Ltd.'s
advocacy and demand of for-profit corporate copyright assignment without
promises to adhere to copyleft <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft>. I've
often asked Canonical employees, including Jono
Bacon<http://www.jonobacon.org/>,
Amanda Brock <https://opensource.com/users/brocka>, Jane
Silber<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Silber>,
and Mark Shuttleworth <http://www.markshuttleworth.com/> himself to explain
(a) why exactly they demand copyright assignment on their
projects<http://www.canonical.com/contributors>,
rather than merely having contributors agree to the GNU
GPL<http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>formally (like projects such
as Linux do), and (b) why, having received a
contributor's copyright assignment, Canonical, Ltd. *refuses to* promise to
keep the software copylefted and never proprietarize it
(FSF<http://www.fsf.org/>,
for example, has always done the latter in assignments). When I ask these
questions of Canonical, Ltd. employees, they invariably artfully change the
subject.

I've actually been asking these questions for at least a year and a half,
but I really began to get worried earlier this year when Mark Shuttleworth
falsely claimed<http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/02/01/copyright-not-all-equal.html>that
Canonical,
Ltd.'s copyright assignment was no different than the FSF's copyright
assignment. That event made it clear to me that there was a job of
salesmanship going on: Canonical, Ltd. was trying to sell something to
community that the community doesn't want nor need, and trying to reuse the
good name of other people and organizations to do it.

Since that interview in February, Canonical, Ltd. has launched a
manipulatively named product called “Project
Harmony�<http://opensource.com/law/10/6/project-harmony-looks-improve-contribution-agreements-0>.
They market this product as a “summit� of sorts — purported to have no
determined agenda other than to discuss the issue of contributor agreements
and copyright assignment, and come to a community consensus on this. Their
goal, however, was merely to get community members to lend their good names
to the process. Indeed, Canonical, Ltd. has oft attempted to use the
involvement of good people to make it seem as if Canonical, Ltd.'s agenda is
endorsed by many. In fact, FSF recently distanced itself from the
process<http://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/project-harmony>because of
Canonical, Ltd.'s actions in this regard. Simon
Phipps has similarly distanced himself before
that<http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2010/08/on-contributor-agreements/index.htm>
.

Nevertheless, it seems Canonical, Ltd. now believes that they've succeed in
their sales job, because they've now confessed their true motive. In an IRC
Q&A session <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MeetingLogs/openweekMaverick/AskMark>last
Thursday
0<http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/10/17/shuttleworth-admits-it.html#footnote-omgubuntu-secondary-source>,
Shuttleworth finally admits that his goal is to increase the amount of “Open
Core� <http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2009/10/16/open-core-shareware.html>activity.
Specifically, Shuttleworth says at 15:21 (and following):

[C]ompare Qt and Gtk, Qt has a contribution agreement, Gtk doesn't, for a
while, back in the bubble, Sun, Red Hat, Ximian and many other companies
threw money at Gtk and it grew and improved very quickly but, then they lost
interest, and it has stagnated. Qt was owned by Trolltech it was open source
(GPL) but because of the contribution agreement they had many options
including proprietary licensing, which is just fine with me alongside the
GPL and later, because they owned Qt completely, they were an attractive
acquisition for Nokia, All in all, the Qt ecosystem has benefitted [sic] and
the Gtk ecosystem hasn't.

It takes some careful analysis to parse what's going on here. First of all,
Shuttleworth is glossing over a lot of complicated Qt history. Qt started
with a non-FaiF license (QPL), which later became a GPL-incompatible Free
Software license <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_Public_License>. After a
few years of this oddball,
license-proliferation<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/License_proliferation>-style
software freedom license, Trolltech stumbled upon the “Open Core� model
(likely inspired by MySQL AB), and switched to GPL. When Nokia bought
Trolltech <http://mobile.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/01/28/136204>, Nokia
itself discovered that full-on “Open Core� was *bad* for the code base, and
(as I heralded at the time<http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2009/01/14/qt-lgpl.html>)
relicensed the codebase to
LGPL<http://qt.nokia.com/about/news/lgpl-license-option-added-to-qt>(the
*same* license used by Gtk). A few months after that, Nokia abandoned
copyright assignment completely for
Qt<http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2009/05/11/qt-public-repository-launched/>as
well! (I.e., Shuttleworth is just wrong on this point entirely.) In
fact,
Shuttleworth, rather than supporting his pro-Open-Core argument, actually
gave the prime example of Nokia/TrollTech's lesson learned: “don't do an
Open-Core-style contributor agreement, you'll regret it�. (RMS also recently
published a good essay on this
subject<http://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/assigning-copyright>
).

Furthermore, Shuttleworth also ignores completely plenty of historical angst
in communities that rely on Qt, which often had difficulty getting bugfixes
upstream and other such challenges when dealing with a for-profit controlled
“Open Core� library. (These were, in fact, among the reasons Nokia gave in
May 2009 for the change in
policy<http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2009/05/11/qt-public-repository-launched/>).
Indeed, if the proprietary relicensing business is what made Trolltech such
a lucrative acquisition for Nokia, why did they abandon the business model
entirely within four months of the acquisition?

Although, Shuttleworth's “lucrative acquisition� point has some validity.
Namely, “Open Core� makes wealthy, profit-driven types (e.g., VCs) drool.
Meanwhile, people like
me<http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2009/10/16/open-core-shareware.html>,
Simon Phipps<http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2010/06/open-core-is-bad-for-you/index.htm>,
NASA's Chris Kemp<http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2010/07/20/why_nasa_is_dropping_eucalyptus_from_its_nebula_cloud/>,
John Mark Walker <http://www.ostatic.org/blog/open-core-or-open-snore>, Tarus
Balog <http://www.adventuresinoss.com/?p=863> and many others are either
very skeptical about “Open Core�, or dead-set against it. The reason it's
meeting with so much opposition is because “Open Core� is a VC-friendly way
to control all the copyright “assets� while *pretending* to actually have
the goal of building an Open Source community. The real goal of “Open Core�,
of course, is a bait-and-switch move. (Details on that are beyond the scope
of this post and well covered in the links I've given.)

As to Shuttleworth's argument of Gtk stagnation, after my trip this past
summer to GUADEC <http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/08/05/guadec.html>, I'm
quite convinced that the GNOME community is extremely healthy. Indeed, as Dave
Neary's GNOME Census
shows<http://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2010/07/28/gnome-census/>,
the GNOME codebases are well-contributed to by various corporate entities
and (more importantly) volunteers. For-profit corporate folks like
Shuttleworth and his executives tend not to like communities where a
non-profit (in this case, the GNOME Foundation<http://foundation.gnome.org/>)
shepherds a project and keeps the multiple for-profit interests at bay. In
fact, he dislikes this so much that when GNOME was recently documenting its
long standing copyright policies <http://live.gnome.org/CopyrightAssignment>,
he sent Silber to the GNOME Advisory Board (the first and only time
Canonical, Ltd. sent such a high profile person to the Advisory Board) to
argue against the *long*-standing GNOME community preference for no
copyright assignment on its
projects1<http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/10/17/shuttleworth-admits-it.html#footnote-canonical-gnome-copyright-complaints>.
Silber's primary argument was that it was unreasonable for individual
contributors to even *ask* to keep their own copyrights, since Canonical,
Ltd. puts in the bulk of the work on their projects that require copyright
assignment. * Her argument was, in other words, an anti-software-freedom
equality argument: a for-profit company is more valuable to the community
than the individual contributor.* Fortunately, GNOME Foundation didn't fall
for this, continued its work with Intel to get the Clutter codebase free of
copyright assignment (and that work has since succeeded). It's also
particularly ironic that, a few months later, Neary showed that the very
company making that argument contributes 22% *less* to the GNOME codebase
than the volunteers Silber once argued don't contribute enough to warrant
keeping their copyrights.

*So, why* have Shuttleworth and his staff been on a year-long campaign to
convince everyone to embrace “Open Core� and give up all their rights that
copyleft provides? Well, in the same IRC log (at 15:15) I quoted above,
Shuttleworth admits that he has some work left to do to make Canonical, Ltd.
profitable. And therein lies the connection: Shuttleworth admits Canonical,
Ltd.'s profitability is a major goal (which is probably obvious). Then, in
his next answer, he explains at great length how lucrative and important
“Open Core� is. *We should accept “Open Core�, Shuttleworth argues, merely
because it's so important that Canonical, Ltd. be profitable.*

Shuttleworth's argument reminds me of a story that Michael
Moore<http://www.michaelmoore.com/>(who famously made the
documentary Roger and Me <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_&_Me>, and has
since made other documentaries) told at a book-signing in the mid-1990s.
Moore said (I'm paraphrasing from memory here, BTW):

Inevitably, I end up on planes next to some corporate executive. They look
at me a few times, and then say: Hey, I know you, you're Roger Moore
[audience laughs]. What I want to know, is what the hell have you got
against *profit*? What's wrong with profit, anyway? The answer I give is
simple: There's nothing wrong with profit at all. The question I'm raising
is: What lengths are acceptable to achieve profit? We all agree that we
can't exploit child labor and other such things, even if that helps
profitability. Yet, once upon a time, these sorts of horrible policies were
acceptable for corporations. So, my point is that we still need more changes
to balance the push for profit with what's right for workers.

I quote this at length to make it abundantly clear: I'm not opposed to
Canonical, Ltd. making a profit by supporting software freedom. I'm glad
that Shuttleworth has contributed a non-trivial part of his personal wealth
to start a company that employs many excellent FLOSS developers (and even
sometimes lets those developers work on upstream projects). But the question
really is: Are the values of software freedom worth giving up merely to make
Canonical, Ltd. profitable? Should we just accept that proprietary network
services like UbuntuOne<https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntuone-servers/+bug/375272>,
integrated on nearly every menu of the desktop, as reasonable merely because
it might help Canonical, Ltd. make a few bucks? Do we think we should
abandon copyleft's assurances of fair treatment to all, and hand over full
proprietarization powers on GPL'd software to for-profit companies, merely
so they can employ a few FLOSS developers to work primarily on non-upstream
projects?

I don't think so. I'm often critical of Red Hat, but one thing they do get
right in this regard is a healthy encouragement of their developers to
start, contribute to, and maintain upstream projects that live in the
community rather than inside Red Hat. Red Hat currently allows its engineers
to keep their own copyrights and license them under whatever license the
upstream project uses, binding them to the terms of the copyleft licenses
(when the upstream project is copylefted). Red Hat even encourages outside
contributors to give under their own copyright under the outbound license
Red Hat chose for its projects (some of which are also copylefted). This set
of policies has some flaws (details of which are beyond the scope of this
post), but it's orders of magnitude better than the copyright assignment
intimidation tactics that other companies, like Canonical, Ltd., now employ.

So, don't let a friendly name like “Harmony� fool you. Our community has
some key infrastructure, such as the copyleft itself, that *actually* keeps
us harmonious. Contributor agreements aren't created
equal<http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/02/01/copyright-not-all-equal.html>,
and therefore we should oppose the idea that contributor and assignment
agreements should be set to the lowest common denominator to enable a
for-profit corporate land-grab that Shuttleworth and other “Open Core�
proponents seek. I also strongly advise the organizations and individuals
who are assisting Canonical, Ltd. in this goal to stop immediately,
particularly now that Shuttleworth has announced his “Open Core� plans.
------------------------------

0<http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/10/17/shuttleworth-admits-it.html#return-omgubuntu-secondary-source>I
originally credited OMG Ubuntu as publishing Shutleworth's comments as an
interview<http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/10/mark-shuttleworth-talks-projcet-harmony-unity-and-more/>.
Their reformatting of his comments temporarily confused me, and I thought
they'd done an interview. Thanks to
@gotunandan<http://identi.ca/gotunandan>who pointed
this out <http://identi.ca/notice/56487822>.

1<http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/10/17/shuttleworth-admits-it.html#return-canonical-gnome-copyright-complaints>Ironically,
the debate had nothing to do with a Canonical, Ltd. codebase, since their
contributions amount to so little (1%) of the GNOME codebase anyway. The
debate was about the Clutter/Intel situation, which has since been resolved.

Posted on Sunday 17 October 2010 at 11:30 by Bradley M. Kuhn.

Comment on this post in this identi.ca
conversation<http://identi.ca/conversation/55760715#notice-56485409>.

http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/10/17/shuttleworth-admits-it.html


-- 
Pablo Manuel Rizzo
-------------------------------
http://pablorizzo.com
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