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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>como en esta misma lista dijera otro prócer del
software libre en la Argentina,</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>"Si la GPL a tu fin no
alcanza..............................poniendo estaba la gansa!!!!!",
jajajajaj</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>larga vida a Ubuntu!!!</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Larga vida al software de código
abierto!!!</FONT></DIV>
<BLOCKQUOTE
style="PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #000000 2px solid; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial">----- Original Message ----- </DIV>
<DIV
style="BACKGROUND: #e4e4e4; FONT: 10pt arial; font-color: black"><B>From:</B>
<A title=info@pablorizzo.com href="mailto:info@pablorizzo.com">Pablo Manuel
Rizzo</A> </DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>To:</B> <A
title=solar-general@lists.ourproject.org
href="mailto:solar-general@lists.ourproject.org">La lista de todos y todas en
solar</A> </DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Sent:</B> Sunday, October 17, 2010 2:52
PM</DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Subject:</B> [Solar-general] Canonical, Ltd.
Finally On Record: Seeking Open Core</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<H1>Canonical, Ltd. Finally On Record: Seeking Open Core</H1>
<P class=topAttributionWithDate>Sunday 17 October 2010 by Bradley M. Kuhn
<BR></P>
<P class=topAttributionWithDate><BR></P>
<P></P>
<P><A
href="http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/02/01/copyright-not-all-equal.html">I've
written before</A> 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 <A
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft">copyleft</A>. I've often asked
Canonical employees, including <A href="http://www.jonobacon.org/">Jono
Bacon</A>, <A href="https://opensource.com/users/brocka">Amanda Brock</A>, <A
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Silber">Jane Silber</A>, and <A
href="http://www.markshuttleworth.com/">Mark Shuttleworth</A> himself to
explain (a) why exactly they <A
href="http://www.canonical.com/contributors">demand copyright assignment on
their projects</A>, rather than merely having contributors agree to the <A
href="http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html">GNU <ACRONYM
title="General Public License">GPL</ACRONYM></A> formally (like projects such
as Linux do), and (b) why, having received a contributor's copyright
assignment, Canonical, Ltd. <STRONG>refuses to</STRONG> promise to keep the
software copylefted and never proprietarize it (<A
href="http://www.fsf.org/"><ACRONYM
title="Free Software Foundation">FSF</ACRONYM></A>, for
example, has always done the latter in assignments). When I ask these
questions of Canonical, Ltd. employees, they invariably artfully change the
subject.</P>
<P>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 <A
href="http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/02/01/copyright-not-all-equal.html">Mark
Shuttleworth falsely claimed</A> that <Q>Canonical, Ltd.'s copyright
assignment was no different than the FSF's copyright assignment</Q>. 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.</P>
<P>Since that interview in February, Canonical, Ltd. has launched a
manipulatively named product called <A
href="http://opensource.com/law/10/6/project-harmony-looks-improve-contribution-agreements-0">“Project
Harmony”</A>. They market this product as a “summit” of sorts — purported to
have no determined agenda other than to <Q>discuss</Q> the issue of
contributor agreements and copyright assignment, and come to a <Q>community
consensus</Q> 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, <A
href="http://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/project-harmony">FSF recently
distanced itself from the process</A> because of Canonical, Ltd.'s actions in
this regard. <A
href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2010/08/on-contributor-agreements/index.htm">Simon
Phipps has similarly distanced himself before that</A>.</P>
<P>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 <A
href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MeetingLogs/openweekMaverick/AskMark">IRC
Q&A session</A> last Thursday<SUP><A id=return-omgubuntu-secondary-source
href="http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/10/17/shuttleworth-admits-it.html#footnote-omgubuntu-secondary-source">0</A></SUP>,
Shuttleworth finally admits that his goal is to increase the amount of <A
href="http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2009/10/16/open-core-shareware.html">“Open
Core”</A> activity. Specifically, Shuttleworth says at 15:21 (and following):
</P>
<BLOCKQUOTE>[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. </BLOCKQUOTE>
<P>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-<ACRONYM title="Free as in Freedom">FaiF</ACRONYM> license (QPL), which
<A href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_Public_License">later became a
GPL-incompatible Free Software license</A>. After a few years of this oddball,
<A
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/License_proliferation">license-proliferation</A>-style
software freedom license, Trolltech stumbled upon the “Open Core” model
(likely inspired by MySQL AB), and switched to GPL. When <A
href="http://mobile.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/01/28/136204">Nokia bought
Trolltech</A>, Nokia itself discovered that full-on “Open Core” was
<EM>bad</EM> for the code base, and (as <A
href="http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2009/01/14/qt-lgpl.html">I heralded at the
time</A>) <A
href="http://qt.nokia.com/about/news/lgpl-license-option-added-to-qt">relicensed
the codebase to LGPL</A> (the <EM>same</EM> license used by Gtk). A few months
after that, Nokia <A
href="http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2009/05/11/qt-public-repository-launched/">abandoned
copyright assignment completely for Qt</A> 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”. (<ACRONYM
title="Richard M. Stallman">RMS</ACRONYM> also recently <A
href="http://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/assigning-copyright">published a good essay
on this subject</A>).</P>
<P>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 <A
href="http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2009/05/11/qt-public-repository-launched/">Nokia
gave in May 2009 for the change in policy</A>). 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?</P>
<P>Although, Shuttleworth's “lucrative acquisition” point has some validity.
Namely, “Open Core” makes wealthy, profit-driven types (e.g., <ACRONYM
title="Venture Capitalists">VC</ACRONYM>s) drool. Meanwhile, people like <A
href="http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2009/10/16/open-core-shareware.html">me</A>,
<A
href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2010/06/open-core-is-bad-for-you/index.htm">Simon
Phipps</A>, <A
href="http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2010/07/20/why_nasa_is_dropping_eucalyptus_from_its_nebula_cloud/">NASA's
Chris Kemp</A>, <A
href="http://www.ostatic.org/blog/open-core-or-open-snore">John Mark
Walker</A>, <A href="http://www.adventuresinoss.com/?p=863">Tarus Balog</A>
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
<EM>pretending</EM> 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.)</P>
<P>As to Shuttleworth's argument of Gtk stagnation, after my <A
href="http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/08/05/guadec.html">trip this past summer
to GUADEC</A>, I'm quite convinced that the GNOME community is extremely
healthy. Indeed, as <A
href="http://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2010/07/28/gnome-census/">Dave Neary's
GNOME Census shows</A>, 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 <A href="http://foundation.gnome.org/">GNOME
Foundation</A>) shepherds a project and keeps the multiple for-profit
interests at bay. In fact, he dislikes this so much that when GNOME was
recently <A href="http://live.gnome.org/CopyrightAssignment">documenting its
long standing copyright policies</A>, 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 <STRONG>long</STRONG>-standing
GNOME community preference for no copyright assignment on its projects<SUP><A
id=return-canonical-gnome-copyright-complaints
href="http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/10/17/shuttleworth-admits-it.html#footnote-canonical-gnome-copyright-complaints">1</A></SUP>.
Silber's primary argument was that it was unreasonable for individual
contributors to even <EM>ask</EM> to keep their own copyrights, since
Canonical, Ltd. puts in the bulk of the work on their projects that require
copyright assignment. <B>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.</B> 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%
<EM>less</EM> to the GNOME codebase than the volunteers Silber once argued
<Q>don't contribute enough to warrant keeping their copyrights</Q>.</P>
<P><B>So, why</B> 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 <Q>some</Q> 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. <B>We should accept “Open Core”, Shuttleworth
argues, merely because it's so important that Canonical, Ltd. be
profitable.</B></P>
<P>Shuttleworth's argument reminds me of a story that <A
href="http://www.michaelmoore.com/">Michael Moore</A> (who famously made <A
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_&_Me">the documentary <CITE>Roger
and Me</CITE></A>, and has since made other documentaries) told at a
book-signing in the mid-1990s. Moore said (I'm paraphrasing from memory here,
BTW): </P>
<BLOCKQUOTE>Inevitably, I end up on planes next to some corporate executive.
They look at me a few times, and then say: <Q>Hey, I know you, you're Roger
Moore [audience laughs]. What I want to know, is what the hell have you got
against <EM>profit</EM>? What's wrong with profit, anyway?</Q> 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. </BLOCKQUOTE>
<P>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 <ACRONYM
title="Free, Libre, and Open Source Software">FLOSS</ACRONYM> 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 <A
href="https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntuone-servers/+bug/375272">proprietary
network services like UbuntuOne</A>, 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?</P>
<P>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.</P>
<P>So, don't let a friendly name like “Harmony” fool you. Our community has
some key infrastructure, such as the copyleft itself, that <EM>actually</EM>
keeps us harmonious. <A
href="http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/02/01/copyright-not-all-equal.html">Contributor
agreements aren't created equal</A>, 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.</P>
<HR class=footnote-separator>
<P><SUP><A id=footnote-omgubuntu-secondary-source
href="http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/10/17/shuttleworth-admits-it.html#return-omgubuntu-secondary-source">0</A></SUP>I
originally credited <CITE>OMG Ubuntu</CITE> as <A
href="http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/10/mark-shuttleworth-talks-projcet-harmony-unity-and-more/">publishing
Shutleworth's comments as an interview</A>. Their reformatting of his comments
temporarily confused me, and I thought they'd done an interview. Thanks to <A
href="http://identi.ca/gotunandan">@gotunandan</A> who <A
href="http://identi.ca/notice/56487822">pointed this out</A>. </P>
<P><SUP><A id=footnote-canonical-gnome-copyright-complaints
href="http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/10/17/shuttleworth-admits-it.html#return-canonical-gnome-copyright-complaints">1</A></SUP>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.</P><IMG alt=""
src="http://ebb.org/images/2010-10-17-shuttleworth.jpg">
<P class=bottomAttributionWithDate>Posted on Sunday 17 October 2010 at 11:30
by Bradley M. Kuhn. </P>
<P class=comments>Comment on this post in <A
href="http://identi.ca/conversation/55760715#notice-56485409">this identi.ca
conversation</A>. </P><A
href="http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/10/17/shuttleworth-admits-it.html">http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/10/17/shuttleworth-admits-it.html</A><BR><BR><BR>--
<BR>Pablo Manuel Rizzo<BR>-------------------------------<BR><A
href="http://pablorizzo.com">http://pablorizzo.com</A><BR>-------------------------------<BR><BR><BR>
<P>
<HR>
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