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

Don't set your goals too low

[Anonymous Coward]

Neither do we get to follow Dick the Butcher's suggestion in Henry the Sixth, and kill all the lawyers.

WRONG! It's just a matter of attitude and motivation. Don't set your goals too low!

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?

[Bruce Perens]

Even corporations should be concerned about the prospect of their work being taken private - the project being removed from Open Source and made commercial-only - shortly after their contribution. After all, corporations have to account to their stockholders, and a contribution that can go private quickly would indicate a lack of due diligence or poor negotiation, that could potentially result in lost money, time, and resources.

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.

Re:Contribution for what return?

[jedidiah]

No. I'm looking at the world through a corporate mindset that has trust issues with other companies.

The GPL was created not because RMS had a political agenda but because some corporation chose to take advantage of the community. His contributors rightfully objected to the situation and held him responsible.

Any collaboration framework needs to work as intended even in the worst case scenario. You can't just engage in "wishful thinking" with business entities. You will just get taken advantage of.

I am not supporting any project...

[paulsnx2]

...that precludes the killing of all the lawyers.

err so the EFF, the ACLU...

[decora]

virtually every case of court precedent that involves the first amendment. . .

the vast body of Freedom of Information Act cases....

the FOIA itself, which was caused to exist, by lawyers...

the public defenders who fight for the rights of whistleblowers?

i kind of like lawyers.

Re:better than nothing?

[Bruce Perens]

Your own work (not work for hire) is your property, and is fully copyrighted the moment you write it. Nothing in the agreement would strengthen the status of your copyright. You choose to place it under a license and contribute it to a project. If they remove your attribution, you have legal grounds to sue them.

A contributor agreement doesn't really get you anything you wouldn't already have, and is likely to remove rights you do have.

Re:Remember when ubuntu wasn't a democrazy?

[rtfa-troll]

The FSF contracts require that the FSF always release the software under licenses which are substantially similar to the one you released it under. That gives the FSF no possibility to close the source. Canonical's agreements aren't the same at all since Canonical gets the right to release the code under any license they like. That's unfair and rediculous. If Canonical wants to do that then they should be paying you since you are essentially working 100% for them.

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/