Harmony Project Pushes Lawyers Off FOSS's Back

Julie188 writes "Harmony is an effort that was begun and shepherded by Amanda Brock, the general counsel at Canonical. The intent was to create a small collection of consistently-worded contribution agreements (both licenses and assignments) for free and open source projects to use to reduce the friction such agreements can cause when they're encountered for the first time by corporate counsel unfamiliar with FOSS licensing. Version 1.0 of the documents have launched. As court cases involving software copyrights and patents continue to sprout forth, we don't have the liberty of ignoring the changes brought on by the law. Neither do we get to follow Dick the Butcher's suggestion in Henry the Sixth, and kill all the lawyers."

Comments

Contribution for what return?

[Bruce Perens]

Having a standard set of contribution agreements does not push lawyers off of the backs of FOSS developers. It just helps them give up all of their rights for nothing, without the counsel of a lawyer who might tell them that's not a smart thing to do. Where is the covenant to developers in return for their contribution? There is none.

I provided strategy for the contribution agreement for the project of very large company, on a project that is about to be presented to developers. The company covenants to the developer that they will keep their work on the project in Open Source for a period of several years, or will remove the contribution from the non-Open-Source version of the work.

Another alternative is to pay the developer for their work.

Signing your contribution over to a for-profit enterprise without any quid-pro-quo is just crazy. You're making yourself their unpaid employee.

Re:Contribution for what return?

[rtfa-troll]

Bruce is 100% right here. There are two kinds of contribution agreement; those which promise to continue distributing the software on the same terms as you distributed it to them and those that cheat you. Canonical's agreements are the type which cheat you, whilst the agreements of the Fedora project, the FSF and most other FOSS projects are not. Groklaw has already done some serious investigation of Canonical and project harmony and that's probably the place to start.

What you want to watch out for is groups which take your code and establish a special advantage for themselves. Apart from the article above you might find the article "How to Tell When an Open Source Foundation Isn't About You" very useful. There are many examples of this danger, Oracle's recent mess being the latest. If a project won't accept your contribution then import it into Gitorious and fork it. Provide your changes as a patch and look for others doing the same. Eventually, when the project closes up you will have the basis of a free fork. Contributing to Canonical really looks like a thing to avoid unless it's really clear it's going to save you lots of effort and it's clear that someone else is maintaining a separate archive of the software ready to fork.

Critiques from experts

[ciaran_o_riordan]

Some negative reviews of the project's concept:

* Richard Fontana: http://opensource.com/law/11/7/trouble-harmony-part-1
* Bradley Kuhn: http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2011/07/07/harmony-harmful.html
* David Neary: http://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2011/07/06/harmony-agreements-reach-1-0/