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Evolution Bounty Stirs GPL Concerns
Moochman writes "The recent Desktop Integration Bounty (funded by Novell) will surely please people who want Evolution to be part of GNOME. But the Ximian Evolution copyright assignment has stirred up concerns in the community about whether contributors will be able to maintain their Free Software mores. Essentially, contributors to Evolution must give Novell copyright over any code they submit; then Novell is allowed to include this code in a proprietary product. Is this a smart business move, or a violation of the GPL?" Since all contributions are only at the request of the contributing coder, and considering that the copyright assignment form says that "Ximian agrees to grant back to Developer, and does hereby grant, nonexclusive, royaltyfree and noncancelable rights to use the Works," and specifies that Novell/Ximian release the code under a license compatible with the Debian Free Software Guidelines (such as the GPL), it seems to protect the contributors rather well.
How is this any different? Because they are also going to sell a proprietary version? The developers will sign the rights over to Ximian, so how is this any different from dual-licensing like MySQLs? I mean, Ximian will own the code..
The Free Software Foundation also asks programmers to sign over the copyright of any code they contribute. Ditto with the OpenOffice people. This is a perfectly normal request; having code licensed under both the GPL and some other license is quite common (OpenOffice, etc.).
Nothing to see here, move along.
As far as I can see it, this really is an internal debate. The complaints have been made, and resolutions are starting to take place, and THEN it ends up on Slashdot? Where's the BS filter gone? This is completely irrelevant for someone outside of the community to solve, and it's the community that will eventually resolve this. In addition, there are multiple discussions that have been mistaken for one here: The bounties are not directly involved with the copyright assignment debate at all.
Just leave it already. Seems that this passes pretty unseen amongst outsiders anyway.
I don't pretend to know the GPL but I think I know the spirit of it pretty well.
I think that so long as the code remains free, I have no problem with an organization being enabled to use the code in their own commercial product. I think it would be ridiculous for them not to be able to gain benefit from the activity they sponsor.
I guess what they are trying to do is say "okay, anything you give is ours first and then we give it back... but we want to be able to use it in proprietary code but you still get to keep the code too..."
We were able to recently bring Jeremy Cole of MySQL in to talk with our group, and he explained that MySQL has a very similar dual-licensing methodology. This allows MySQL to sell their software commercially for those who want to include it in their products (I understand MySQL is used in telecom lots), and the companies that purchase it don't have to distribute the source with their products (which would be a hardship for them and possibly prevent them from using MySQL as a result). Additionally, MySQL AB is able to release the open version of MySQL for those who want to modify the source and tinker to their hearts contents. All contributors to the MySQL codebase have to sign-off on their code and the dual licensing, and this seems to be working well around the board, with a win-win for everyone. This way of doing things seems to support the company and a great database!
Most of these, such as apache or GNU, require the code signover for reasons of ease of legal bookkeeping, or as a way of absolutely ensuring they have the right to use the code.. GNU requires this because part of their function is to police GPL violations, but they can't effectively take legal action concerning code they don't own. People rarely have trouble with signing over their code copyright in such instances because the projects in question have no form of greed or self-interest in asking for the copyright.
This Evolution thing meanwhile you're being required to hand over the copyright so that Novell can turn around and sell it in a proprietary product. This is slightly different. Rather than being asked to hand over the copyright for the good of the community and users, you're being asked to hand over the copyright for the good of Novell.
This is actually exactly like MySQL and a lot of people do hesitate before contributing code to MySQL for exactly this same reason.
Perhaps that should be amended to read "the majority of people that use software on Win, Mac, and other non-free operating systems." Of them, it is certainly true that most of them don't give a flying fsck about the license, and a good number of them are quiet willing to use warez, from which we can reasonably assume they don't care about compliance with the license either.
Among Linux users (and BSD users as well, although Linux users tend to be more "excitable" on this point), however, there are a great many people who care a great deal about the license. I sometimes used proprietary software if there is no acceptable alternative under a free license, but like a lot of people who use Linux, I will often choose a GPled (or other free-licensed) product over a proprietary one even if the proprietary one is better. The Free one just has to be "good enough" and under active development so that it is improving. Put another way, many of us will accept software that is far rougher and in a developmental stage as long as it is FOSS. If it's proprietary, we're going to demand more. Partly because of licensing and partly because if I'm paying for it, I should be able to reasonably expect that I am not paying to be a beta tester. Some of my gripe with proprietary software is that I have often found that no matter what the marketing spin says, it's so rough that in fact I *have* just paid to be a beta tester. When I want to beta stuff, I will volunteer. I certainly won't pay for the "privilege."
So yes, actually, many people do indeed give a flying fsck about the license on the software they use.
You've exposed an underlying fallacy of open source and the GPL: No direct link exists between source availability and innovation.
In this particular case, the open source community is using a widely loathed proprietary program -- Outlook -- as both model and yardstick for one of it's premier offerings, Evolution. Ditto OpenOffice.
If the GPL does foster the creation of new and innovative applications, why has the community not already brought forth an email client and an office client that are so convincingly innovative, useful and attractive that people will happily abandon the Outlook/MSOffice paradigms in order to adopt them?
Granted, source availability does spread innovative ideas once they occur in the mind of a given developer. But, it seems clear that a developer working in a closed, proprietary environment can be just as innovative as one working in an free and open environment. Financial reward can, in fact, be a wonderful spur to creativity.
It could be argued, as well, that the availability of code works against innovation because developers often use existing code as a model rather than strike out into new territory.
The GPL and open source represent many good things, but they are no better or no worse at fostering creativity than the proprietary model.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
This is not a violation of the GPL.
But this is a reason to not make Evolution an integral part of Gnome.
There is nothing wrong with Novell doing this, but please don't compare it to situations where developers are asked to assign their code to a foundation. The wxWidgets, Mozilla, Gnome, Apache, Python, etc. foundations have mandates to help their users and contributors. Novell is a corporation, and it is ultimately only responsible to its shareholders.
Novell with Evolution and Sun with OpenOffice - these are like TrollTech with Qt. Better than closed source, but not as good as software which is guided by the interests of its users and developers.
I really don't understand what people are unhappy about. Novell is offering to pay people to add certain features to Evolution and Gnome. In return for that payment, Novell wants to own the copyright of the resulting code (so they can also use it in their proprietary products), but they promise to also make sure the code is released under a free license (not unreasonable since they are making the offer to a community of free software developers). If you don't like those terms, feel free to not send your code to Novell and not collect any bounty. If other people do like those terms, that is their business.
Come on guys, this is OLD news. Ximian did this years ago, and nothing's changed except the name.
It hasn't been a real problem with any of the few contributions we've had to the codebase; i think maybe one or two guys got upset about it. It's been more of a hinderance to us, limiting what extenal projects we can utilise for some of the chunkier features. Bigger deterrants to potential contributors is the rapid development pace, limited documentation, the size of the codebase, and our anally retarded quality requirements for patches.
Some of the extensions people want to do aren't useful to the general community and would impact on the user experience for everyone else, or they had under-developed GUI interfaces which we couldn't include in the main product, or they were just poor code. In reality we're lucky if we've had 5% of the code from non-company contributors, and that is probably being generous. So much for Free Software. Often it's quicker and easier to write it ourselves than try to get someone's patch up to speed, unfortunately; but thats a non-technical and non-legal issue.
In 2.2 we'll have an extension mechanism that will let anyone write extensions and release them separate to the main codebase. This will entirely negate most of the issues here since the code will no longer have to be accepted into the main codebase to extend Evolution, and hence wont require assignment. We'll have something like the kernel tainting mechanism to enforce valid combinations (and also to let us know if it isn't our bug).
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