In general, companies want to be able to enforce the copyright of the entire product. It is possible that a company could be convinced to join the scheme as you propose it, but the risk and legal load for the company are appreciably higher than what I have proposed, so the company would have to be expecting to get a lot from the community in order to justify that. I'm not sure the balance would work for the company.
The three-year clock will start anew every time there's another copyright contribution.
Per product, or per version? How about forks?
I can't think of anything that could be used to exclude a version from the agreement, so it's every version of the work that has been contributed to (that could be more than one product) during the 3 year period.
If someone other than LN forks the work they are restricted to AGPL 3.0 terms. LN, as the copyright holder, is the party with a right to issue a commercial license. We don't need a covenant with folks who can only use AGPL 3.0.
What happens to the covenant in a bankruptcy hearing? Bankruptcy judges have relatively free reign... Could it be bad?
The covenant should apply to assigns who acquire the work through a bankruptcy. Bankruptcy judges have sometimes revoked source code escrow clauses. Not sure if they could do that to us. Right now, the company is owned by Elsevier, no bankruptcy in sight.
If starting anew, isn't it simpler / cleaner to have a non-profit that owns the open source code, and a private for-profit that applies the code? If not starting anew then you've got some pretty confusing balance sheet issues with transferring ownership, in which case the covenant makes sense.
This is a 10-year-old product with an appreciable fraction of a Billion invested into it. Not a start anew. The owner wanted to stay the owner:-)
Should I care? If version 7.4 is GPL, and they close 7.5 and above, can't I just fork off 7.4 and run it myself aside from any trademark problems?
I would care if someone had a commercial version of my code that was closed, with no quid-pro-quo. Folks who don't care about that put BSD licensing on what they write. But not everyone does.
If a company is planning on taking ye olde version 1.3 and going private with it in just 6 more months, perhaps because they're insane, regardless, wouldn't that encourage them to not accept security patches from the community? Not saying this "enforcement aspect" is good or bad, just saying it "is".
Well, the purpose of the agreement is to keep the company in partnership with the community by making it sufficiently unpalatable for them to leave.
What if the management team intends to burn it to the ground to extract maximal profit for one quarter at the cost of permanent long term damage, in other words traditional American management style?
Then you get the BSD version eventually, and can go into business for yourself if you want to provide an alternative to them.
Unnecessarily complicated. If it's already under Affero GPL then people can already build on it-"contributing the product to a non-profit" doesn't add anything to that and there's no reason to assume that people who choose to contribute to a GPL project want to have their code licensed under BSD anyway (and vice versa) - some will be happy with this but others won't. On balance, what's the point?
Consider why people want to have their work accepted by the project, rather than just maintain their modification independently. Consider the hoops that companies jump through just to get Linus to accept their patches. Now, consider that LN will maintain your modification for you with paid employees, if they accept it. Yes, there is value in that.
So this is fuel on the old discussion between "Open Source" (Bruce Perens et al) and Free Software (RMS et al)?
Hi AC,
Since I did advise Lexis Nexis to use the Affero GPL 3.0, a license of the Free Software Foundation, and they have done so, I think this should not be considered as "dissing free software":-)
And yes, it really is ironic that GPL can be used to drive commercial development and that people will pay you for the right to not be under the GPL terms. But this is not dissing free software, it's commenting on the economic paths that it creates.
For a minute, just reading the title, I thought a computer had been married to a Texas couple. Given what some folks tried (and fortunately, now seem to have failed) to put creationism in their school textbooks, I thought this might be the next step. And then we'd see a couple marry their blender.:-)
Why is no one mentioning the possibility that M$'s patents might be legit, novel patents that don't cover something frivolous? That would be a damn fine reason to license the patents.
Because that's absurd.
First, they're software patents. I'm sure lots of folks will be willing to trot out the arguments against those if you actually haven't heard them before, but it should suffice to say that such things should not be granted.
Second, because Microsoft does not have much of a history of innovation. I can break that up into pieces: Their software products have in general been follow-ons to other people's software products. Visicalc -> Lotus 1-2-3 -> Excel, for example. They haven't been innovators in either the mobile telephony industry, or its predecessor the PDA industry. Their products were definitely late-runs in those industry.
Third, because they have a well-known history of filing patents on known art.
We don't really want damages, we want to get whoever it is to comply with the license. We actually have enough force to do that without big damages, because we can block imports, etc.
You can still sue for copyright infringement even if you don't own a majority of the copyrights. And you can sue on behalf of multiple copyright holders. All existing court enforcement of Open Source licenses has been for projects that did not have a unified copyright - did you know that?
FSF has a good reason to keep the copyrights, they are a non-profit (which is really important) and they want to change the license as the law develops. In contrast, companies are getting a lot of power from that unified copyright. I'm not saying not to contribute, I am saying that you should make sure that you get something back, at least in the form of the company making a covenant about keeping the development Open Source for some years after your contribution. Then, you get some of their work contributed to the community, reliably, in return for yours.
I guess it's the one-sidedness of these things that really bothers me.
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.
What is going to happen here is what happened with Creative Commons: a lot of different IPR policies get bundled under the same name so that the uninitiated will not be able to distinguish one from the other. Some of those policies are harmless, and some quite harmful.
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.
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.
I saw. That short a period makes it clear that dogs could have self-selected for tameness in evolving symbiosis with man, and human-driven breeding only came later.
From an evolutionary perspective, there is no doubt that dogs are tremendously successful. Especially considering the habitat destruction. Felis domesticus too, the habitat pressure is so great on the big cats that the local police shot a California Lion on the street by Chez Panisse. It would have had to walk half a mile downhill through suburb to get there.
Not that I support this proposal, but your Yorkie-poo is not an outdoor creature. The outdoor creature from which he is derived is probably a wolf. I am forever astonished at what, over time, has been made from wolves, perhaps with a ton of merciless "culling" of puppies.
Now, suppose that some alien culture abducted a bunch of human beings, and bred them down to the point that their decendants were hairy retarded love slaves as your dog is. How would you feel about that? If the wolf were more intelligent, maybe he'd feel that way about your dog.
Despite the fact that there were a lot of complaints, paranoia about the low-power radio's health effects, and PG&E had an opt-out program forced upon them, the only difference for people who opt out is that someone comes to read the same number from the face of their power meter that would be transmitted by radio.
There is a lot of stuff that people "know" that isn't really evidence. Like all of those cars that have out-of-control acceleration - it was Toyota Prius a while back, and Audi Quattro before it even though the almost identical Volkswagen Jetta didn't have the problem. But all of the evidence was that panicked people had their feet on the wrong pedal.
So, I'd like to see real evidence instead of the common knowledge of a bunch of paranoid folks who never learned the scientific method and treat their power meters with fear because they are incapable of understanding them. We suffer in many things, small and large, from their ignorance.
The problem with these stories is that they are anecdotal. I'm sure some happen, but there really are ways for professionals to measure what is going wrong and I'd like to hear their report.
If your smart meter works like mine, you can walk up to it and get the reading. Once that happens, you can tell if it's the local meter having trouble, or the remote software. If the local meter is having trouble, the next step, unfortunately, requires some technical sophistication. A temporary power has to be installed. This is a clamp-on current sensor that goes around each of the two hot wires at the main panel, and a voltage meter which plugs into two breakers (one on each side of the split phase) and neutral.
These things are not expensive. I've considered a permanent one for my home, although I don't appear to be having trouble with PG&E.
If you see a really odd reading, the next thing to do is have an electrician use a power-factor meter. I would imagine that power-factor is the main problem behind odd readings, but I fail to see how one could get it really far from 1:1 with the equipment in a typical person's home.
Not their SCADA networks, but things like meter reading, sure. If they can only read your meter between 2 and 5 AM while most wifi use hits a lull, that's fine.
The application for this is reading power meters and other continuous but low-bandwidth data. These generally operate in a mesh network. The devices used are generally low-cost and low-power, often in the "Part 15" section of the FCC rules for low-power devices that aren't allowed to interfere with licensed services. The problem is that some homes are too far from any other to link into the mesh, and the expense of reading those meters goes up significantly.
Signal processing theory allows you to trade bandwidth and time for range, such that a signal with a wider bandwidth or longer duration can be received over a greater distance. Hams have been doing this for decades using ultra-low-speed morse, PSK31, and other digital modes.
The achievement isn't really getting a long-range link, you can get 45 miles between mountaintops with wifi and parabolic antennas on a clear day. The achievement would be doing this for a very low installed parts cost and in unlicensed spectrum (which also reduces cost) while avoiding interference from wifi etc.
Apache will provide the LibreOffice folks with a copy of the OpenOffice code base that is under a license which removes any possible obligation they might ever have to Oracle regarding the code, unless they do something incredibly stupid (like failing to attribute or reproduce the license at all as Katzer did in Jacobsen v. Katzer). LibreOffice can choose to use that code base or not.
If we really want to lay blame, it's not just Oracle's. Sun Microsystems didn't ever achieve a viable community for OpenOffice. There were operational and technical reasons, but the one that might have been most important was the requirement to sign your copyright over to a company that might take the work private the next day, with no quid-pro-quo at all.
In 1999 or so, Danise Cooper called me to explain what Sun would do with OpenOffice. I explained at that time that they needed to have some sort of quid-pro-quo for code donors, even if it was only a covenant that Sun would keep their own development available under a free software license for some time or remove the contribution from their version. This was not implemented. It was difficult for independent developers to see a reason to work with Sun.
You mean "Are tools that help you make money good or bad?". There are a lot of senses of good and bad, for example I can take it as an ethical question, which is probably not what you mean.
Perhaps you mean "are tools good or bad for your business?" This can be stated better, though. Does a tool enable you to perform a particular business? Does it reduce cost? Is it likely to cause injury, which would increase costs or cause you to not be able to continue to pursue your business? These make a lot more sense than good and bad.
Or, perhaps you mean is a tool an asset or a liability?
Tools are depreciable assets, not liabilities. The debt you owe for the purchase of a tool would be a liability. If you pay for the tool with cash on hand, there isn't a liability associated with it on the balance sheet of your business.
If the value of the tool depreciates faster than you pay off the debt you incurred to buy it, the liability is greater than the asset.
It seems to me that it makes much more sense to think of this as asset, liability, and depreciation than as good and bad.
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In general, companies want to be able to enforce the copyright of the entire product. It is possible that a company could be convinced to join the scheme as you propose it, but the risk and legal load for the company are appreciably higher than what I have proposed, so the company would have to be expecting to get a lot from the community in order to justify that. I'm not sure the balance would work for the company.
I can't think of anything that could be used to exclude a version from the agreement, so it's every version of the work that has been contributed to (that could be more than one product) during the 3 year period. If someone other than LN forks the work they are restricted to AGPL 3.0 terms. LN, as the copyright holder, is the party with a right to issue a commercial license. We don't need a covenant with folks who can only use AGPL 3.0.
The covenant should apply to assigns who acquire the work through a bankruptcy. Bankruptcy judges have sometimes revoked source code escrow clauses. Not sure if they could do that to us. Right now, the company is owned by Elsevier, no bankruptcy in sight.
This is a 10-year-old product with an appreciable fraction of a Billion invested into it. Not a start anew. The owner wanted to stay the owner :-)
I would care if someone had a commercial version of my code that was closed, with no quid-pro-quo. Folks who don't care about that put BSD licensing on what they write. But not everyone does.
Well, the purpose of the agreement is to keep the company in partnership with the community by making it sufficiently unpalatable for them to leave.
Then you get the BSD version eventually, and can go into business for yourself if you want to provide an alternative to them.
Consider why people want to have their work accepted by the project, rather than just maintain their modification independently. Consider the hoops that companies jump through just to get Linus to accept their patches. Now, consider that LN will maintain your modification for you with paid employees, if they accept it. Yes, there is value in that.
Hi AC,
Since I did advise Lexis Nexis to use the Affero GPL 3.0, a license of the Free Software Foundation, and they have done so, I think this should not be considered as "dissing free software" :-)
And yes, it really is ironic that GPL can be used to drive commercial development and that people will pay you for the right to not be under the GPL terms. But this is not dissing free software, it's commenting on the economic paths that it creates.
For a minute, just reading the title, I thought a computer had been married to a Texas couple. Given what some folks tried (and fortunately, now seem to have failed) to put creationism in their school textbooks, I thought this might be the next step. And then we'd see a couple marry their blender. :-)
Multiplan came after Visicalc and Supercalc, but before 1-2-3. Excel adopted the addressing mode used on Visicalc and 1-2-3.
Because that's absurd.
First, they're software patents. I'm sure lots of folks will be willing to trot out the arguments against those if you actually haven't heard them before, but it should suffice to say that such things should not be granted.
Second, because Microsoft does not have much of a history of innovation. I can break that up into pieces: Their software products have in general been follow-ons to other people's software products. Visicalc -> Lotus 1-2-3 -> Excel, for example. They haven't been innovators in either the mobile telephony industry, or its predecessor the PDA industry. Their products were definitely late-runs in those industry.
Third, because they have a well-known history of filing patents on known art.
We don't really want damages, we want to get whoever it is to comply with the license. We actually have enough force to do that without big damages, because we can block imports, etc.
You can still sue for copyright infringement even if you don't own a majority of the copyrights. And you can sue on behalf of multiple copyright holders. All existing court enforcement of Open Source licenses has been for projects that did not have a unified copyright - did you know that?
FSF has a good reason to keep the copyrights, they are a non-profit (which is really important) and they want to change the license as the law develops. In contrast, companies are getting a lot of power from that unified copyright. I'm not saying not to contribute, I am saying that you should make sure that you get something back, at least in the form of the company making a covenant about keeping the development Open Source for some years after your contribution. Then, you get some of their work contributed to the community, reliably, in return for yours.
I guess it's the one-sidedness of these things that really bothers me.
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.
What is going to happen here is what happened with Creative Commons: a lot of different IPR policies get bundled under the same name so that the uninitiated will not be able to distinguish one from the other. Some of those policies are harmless, and some quite harmful.
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.
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.
There is some chance that the fox docility genes are left over from archaic domestication. We can't be sure it's never happened before.
I saw. That short a period makes it clear that dogs could have self-selected for tameness in evolving symbiosis with man, and human-driven breeding only came later.
From an evolutionary perspective, there is no doubt that dogs are tremendously successful. Especially considering the habitat destruction. Felis domesticus too, the habitat pressure is so great on the big cats that the local police shot a California Lion on the street by Chez Panisse. It would have had to walk half a mile downhill through suburb to get there.
Not that I support this proposal, but your Yorkie-poo is not an outdoor creature. The outdoor creature from which he is derived is probably a wolf. I am forever astonished at what, over time, has been made from wolves, perhaps with a ton of merciless "culling" of puppies.
Now, suppose that some alien culture abducted a bunch of human beings, and bred them down to the point that their decendants were hairy retarded love slaves as your dog is. How would you feel about that? If the wolf were more intelligent, maybe he'd feel that way about your dog.
Despite the fact that there were a lot of complaints, paranoia about the low-power radio's health effects, and PG&E had an opt-out program forced upon them, the only difference for people who opt out is that someone comes to read the same number from the face of their power meter that would be transmitted by radio.
There is a lot of stuff that people "know" that isn't really evidence. Like all of those cars that have out-of-control acceleration - it was Toyota Prius a while back, and Audi Quattro before it even though the almost identical Volkswagen Jetta didn't have the problem. But all of the evidence was that panicked people had their feet on the wrong pedal.
So, I'd like to see real evidence instead of the common knowledge of a bunch of paranoid folks who never learned the scientific method and treat their power meters with fear because they are incapable of understanding them. We suffer in many things, small and large, from their ignorance.
The problem with these stories is that they are anecdotal. I'm sure some happen, but there really are ways for professionals to measure what is going wrong and I'd like to hear their report.
If your smart meter works like mine, you can walk up to it and get the reading. Once that happens, you can tell if it's the local meter having trouble, or the remote software. If the local meter is having trouble, the next step, unfortunately, requires some technical sophistication. A temporary power has to be installed. This is a clamp-on current sensor that goes around each of the two hot wires at the main panel, and a voltage meter which plugs into two breakers (one on each side of the split phase) and neutral.
These things are not expensive. I've considered a permanent one for my home, although I don't appear to be having trouble with PG&E.
If you see a really odd reading, the next thing to do is have an electrician use a power-factor meter. I would imagine that power-factor is the main problem behind odd readings, but I fail to see how one could get it really far from 1:1 with the equipment in a typical person's home.
Not their SCADA networks, but things like meter reading, sure. If they can only read your meter between 2 and 5 AM while most wifi use hits a lull, that's fine.
The application for this is reading power meters and other continuous but low-bandwidth data. These generally operate in a mesh network. The devices used are generally low-cost and low-power, often in the "Part 15" section of the FCC rules for low-power devices that aren't allowed to interfere with licensed services. The problem is that some homes are too far from any other to link into the mesh, and the expense of reading those meters goes up significantly.
Signal processing theory allows you to trade bandwidth and time for range, such that a signal with a wider bandwidth or longer duration can be received over a greater distance. Hams have been doing this for decades using ultra-low-speed morse, PSK31, and other digital modes.
The achievement isn't really getting a long-range link, you can get 45 miles between mountaintops with wifi and parabolic antennas on a clear day. The achievement would be doing this for a very low installed parts cost and in unlicensed spectrum (which also reduces cost) while avoiding interference from wifi etc.
You'd have to pass a radiation scanner first.
Apache will provide the LibreOffice folks with a copy of the OpenOffice code base that is under a license which removes any possible obligation they might ever have to Oracle regarding the code, unless they do something incredibly stupid (like failing to attribute or reproduce the license at all as Katzer did in Jacobsen v. Katzer). LibreOffice can choose to use that code base or not.
If we really want to lay blame, it's not just Oracle's. Sun Microsystems didn't ever achieve a viable community for OpenOffice. There were operational and technical reasons, but the one that might have been most important was the requirement to sign your copyright over to a company that might take the work private the next day, with no quid-pro-quo at all.
In 1999 or so, Danise Cooper called me to explain what Sun would do with OpenOffice. I explained at that time that they needed to have some sort of quid-pro-quo for code donors, even if it was only a covenant that Sun would keep their own development available under a free software license for some time or remove the contribution from their version. This was not implemented. It was difficult for independent developers to see a reason to work with Sun.
You mean "Are tools that help you make money good or bad?". There are a lot of senses of good and bad, for example I can take it as an ethical question, which is probably not what you mean.
Perhaps you mean "are tools good or bad for your business?" This can be stated better, though. Does a tool enable you to perform a particular business? Does it reduce cost? Is it likely to cause injury, which would increase costs or cause you to not be able to continue to pursue your business? These make a lot more sense than good and bad.
Or, perhaps you mean is a tool an asset or a liability?
Tools are depreciable assets, not liabilities. The debt you owe for the purchase of a tool would be a liability. If you pay for the tool with cash on hand, there isn't a liability associated with it on the balance sheet of your business.
If the value of the tool depreciates faster than you pay off the debt you incurred to buy it, the liability is greater than the asset.
It seems to me that it makes much more sense to think of this as asset, liability, and depreciation than as good and bad.
Please read just one book on microeconomics. Your ignorance is inexcusable.