I think you missed the "you don't even have to plug them in" part.
Combine that with simple logging thru a proxy server and you're done, because once people think a camera is keeping an eye on them all the time, they tend to not surf pr0n sites from work as much, so you have far fewer log files to go through in the end if there IS a problem.
You don't even have to plug them in - just point them at each desk and make sure they have a little blinking red LED. Remind everyone in cubicleland to welcome their security-cam-wielding pointy-haired overlords.
They don't because they realized at some point that silverlight... kinda, you know, sucked...
They really don't care how many developers they force to adopt then drop a certain technology.
After all, developer churn is *good* for them - it means keeping them on unstable ground, and trained to respond to the whole "we need a new set of tools and a new language every few years" thing.
When you saw Monkeyboy doing his dance, he was really chanting (with thought balloons in parenthasis) "Developers (are sheep)! Developers (are sheep)! Developers (are sheep)! Developers (are sheep)! Developers (are sheep)! Developers (are sheep)! Developers (are sheep)! Developers (are sheep)! Developers (are sheep)! Developers (are sheep)! Developers (are sheep)! Developers (are sheep)!"
And he's been proven right over and over and over and over. How many different toolsets have the MS crowd have to adopt while the rest of the world standardized on html+css+javascript+php+mysql+*nix as the way to deliver applications, services, and content?
Remember all those rumors of Microsoft wanting to buy Adobe?
This is payback for saying "No" to Uncle Stevie. You can be sure that if the deal had gone through, flash would not only have been supported, but integrated into the next release of IE.
Read about another or Peren's ventures, kiloboot, and note the similarities - especially the lie about requiring copyright assignment so they can sell a commercial license.
Shhhh! Kiloboot is currently in "stealth" mode. Our products are not yet announced. Here's what you can know:
We are building an Open Source product that will be dual-licensed, using a business model somewhat similar to that of MySQL.
The product we're working on is of interest to any entity that operates three or more server or desktop computers.
We are privately held.
Our CEO is Bruce Perens.
The license used for the Open Source version of our product is GPL3, which is accepted by the Open Source Initiative as an OSI Certified Open Source license, and of course is accepted by the Free Software Foundation as Free Software. Since we understand the ethos of Free Software / Open Source, we don't add any terms to GPL3 or modify it in any way.
A commercial license is also available. It comes with support and other perks, and does not have terms of GPL3 that some businesses would prefer to avoid.
We require copyright assignment to accept modifications to our software. This is necessary so that we can vend a commercial license.(emphasis added) Unlike almost everyone else who requires copyright assignment, we covenant with the developer to continue to make an Open Source version of their contribution available as long as we (or our assigns) continue to develop our commercial version. This provides a fair quid-pro-quo for the contributor. Of course, the main incentive for contributing a modification that you have made to our products is that we'll maintain it as part of our main code tree, and you won't have to.
You can read about our leadership and how to contact us.
Perens knows that copyright assignment isn't required to produce a commercial product. The licensing of busybox to manufacturers should have made that point clear. He's not only aware of it (as the original author) - he even makes reverence to it in the discussion. So, why the lies?
Greed? Desperation? Lust for power? Stupidity? Pride? Entitlement? Or, to quote him from lwn, "It was the best deal I could get."
Come clean, Bruce. You've been pushing this sort of one-sided licensing scheme/scam for almost 4 years according to the wayback machine. You owe everyone, if not an apology, at least an explanation.
This is not going to go away. You wanted the attention for your "covenant" - you've got it.
All your points are pretty much dead-on. I think that the reason people are upset is because Perens framed this as a "great opportunity" like it was some sort of step forward in open source licensing, and that the true goals were hidden - in particular, the "they need all the copyrights to protect their product", which is an outright lie (see Novell vs SCO).
That N-L wants to be able to accumulate copyrights so that they can list them as business assets (something else Perens let slip in our arguments) is something that has nothing to do with legally "protecting their product" and everything to do with greed.
Between the FSF FUD last month over how Android is risky because of the GPLv2 and "you should encourage the linux developers to switch to the GPLv3 blah blah blah" and this, I'm sick of the whole GPL mess. So I sat down last night and wrote a first draft of the Respect the Programmer License (RPL). Use the code in any product, no requirements to redistribute, BUT, just like a book, movie, etc, do not alter it. If you want modifications to the file, collaborate with the programmer. Otherwise, write your own shim or wedge to interface between the authors work and your own.
I'm going to start using it on my stuff. It was either that or some variant of the BSD/MIT license because the stench of the freetards is getting to be a bit too much.
It got off to an early start yesterday:-) Seems to happen a lot lately, because there's just SO much silliness abounding on the net that just begs a good whack of the clue-by-4.
Case in point was Bruce Perens lying about the real reasons for the "covenant" - that it wasn't because the company in question needed copyright assignment by coders to protect their rights, but because they want to be able to list the copyrights as assets, and that it wasn't drafted by him, but by the lawyers at NexisLexis, and "was the best he could get".
I don't know... but I think F/LOSS needs to grow up. The movement should be well out of its adolescent phase by now, and dealing with business without looking like a bunch of freetards.
I'd say they'v even gained - they can modify the code for their own use without having to give up the copyright - something not available before.
Most of the community doesn't care about that particular code - we're not running paywalls like parent company Reed-Elsevier, nor are we running a few thousand servers as a data warehouse in the basement to keep the place warm during the winter months. So right now, there's not much incentive to bother.
And this is what we have arrived at for HPCC Systems: the product is to be dual-licensed under the Affero GPL 3.06 and a commercial license. In exchange for each copyright assignment from an Open Source developer...
The real problem is, as per the above, that Perens has stated here that you *have* to assign copyright to any code they accept, and that afterward, "you can still use it under the AGPL". Sure, you can modify it "for your own use", and distribute it under the AGPL, but LexisNexis is the only one who can give someone the right to dual-license (or only commercially license) it at that point.
Why do they need a copyright assignment instead of a grant of rights from the coder? Simple - this agreement was written by their lawyers. Whose rights do you think they're looking out for? Perens has also stated, in further response to one of my points, that they want to list all those copyrights as corporate assets. So it's not just about "protecting their product", but also fattening the corporate net worth.
Perens should know that after you assign copyright, you're not really able to do "what you want with it" except for a certain subset of "what you want". Saying you can still modify it is disengenuous. Forget about granting a commercial license to someone else if LexisNexis welches. They have 3 years AFTER you sue them and get a judgment for breech to do anything they want, and you can't do squat.
An additional problem that one poster pointed out on LWN is that not everyone would be happy to see the covenants' anti-compliance provisions triggered and their code being BSD-licensed.
It's not just Linux that doesn't require copyright assignment. Neither do the BSD folks. Same with the Apache license, the MIT license, etc.
Some people think that slapping "open source" on something will magically attract coders the same as manure attracts flies - it doesn't, but freetards won't accept that.Coders to work on the sort of projects that Perens is proposing cost 6 figures a head.
It takes time to get someone up to speed on the codebase, and even more time before they're able to work without an onerous amount of supervision. It can easily cost between half a million and a million per head over a couple of years, by the time you add in all the extra costs (lost productivity from others supervising, extra reviews, training, losses from those who wash out, etc.) You're not going to find those types of people willing to "give it up" to a lopsided contract drafted by Ben Dover and Phil McCavity for nothing in return except the warm fuzzies.
If Perens can't negotiate a better deal, then maybe he should have asked someone else to do so. Or maybe, like ~99% of the projects out there, it's simply not viable under those conditions.
So change the goals... the reason to open-source it should be to get other sites exercising the code and
When you are working with a company as large as that (LN is a big division of huge Elsevier) with as many separate stake-holders in legal, management, etc., it's always a negotiation. That's what I could get.
...
The lawyer involved wrote the license to be as brief as possible and understandable by non-attorneys. Perhaps this is what bothers you about clause 2?
BTW: The license doesn't change any of your rights - the separate copyright assignment to your masters does.
And as you pointed out elsewhere here, they want to be able to list the copyrights as an asset, so this goes far beyond them just wanting to "protect their commercial code" and why they won't just accept the individual authors giving them a non-exclusive right to use the code in commercial products.
This whole thing is ridiculous. If you're going to push a license on people, don't you think you should understand it first?
Unfortunately, we weren't given the whole story here. Over on lwn, Perens was similarly taken to task over the terms, and here's his response:
When you are working with a company as large as that (LN is a big division of huge Elsevier) with as many separate stake-holders in legal, management, etc., it's always a negotiation. That's what I could get.
There are plenty of posts pointing out how one-sided and/or vague this "covenant" is, and how hard it will be to actually enforce. He also admits in one reply that their lawyer, not him, wrote the license, which explains a lot.
I can understand his position - after all, it creates a job for him, so he has to advocate for it. But the terms suck.
The "supposed to" was courtesy of Microsoft, not me. They certainly wanted to keep everyone on the upgrade treadmill, and it was only because they failed to launch Longhorn on time that XP was kept alive.
When you are working with a company as large as that (LN is a big division of huge Elsevier) with as many separate stake-holders in legal, management, etc., it's always a negotiation. That's what I could get.
In other words, he got p0wned, as many of the commenters over on LWN pointed out. When you can't negotiate a good deal, get up and leave. Don't settle for a bad deal and then try to sell it to everyone - we're not stupid.
He also admitted here that he forgot to ask their lawyer about license-back provisions to people who assign their copyrights. Sloppy, sloppy work, and since this was "all he could get", don't hold your breath.
If this is your idea of the work of a "licensing professional", here's a news flash - the real world works differently. This is already a fiasco and a joke, except nobody's laughing. Such a lop-sided "covenant" is a betrayal of the ideals of open source. But don't let me keep you from drinking the kook-aid.
We raised serious concerns - he dissimulated. We proposed alternatives - he made excuses for why they wouldn't work that were facile at best, and often better characterized as disingenuous.
Before today, I had no reason not to take everything Mr. Perens says at face value. That is gone - probably forever - at this point.
Posted Sep 12, 2011 15:51 UTC (Mon) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]
It seems to me that this is missing an important motivation for developers: many developers want to implement a particular feature so they themselves can use that feature. Consider, for example, a developer who has added a redundancy feature to a database so that the web site they run has better availability; their primary goal is to run the site with a database with this feature. To the extent that these developers expect to get a benefit from contributing the code to the upstream project, it is to reduce the maintenance burden (ultimately by developers considering that to be normal functionality and simply not introducing conflicts). In this situation, the covenant would ensure the worst of all possibilities in the situation where the company took the project proprietary: not only would the developer not have access to the source of future versions, but these future versions would not work for the developer, since the feature would have to be removed. Furthermore, there is a danger in the company then owning the copyright on the implementation of this feature, if the developer decides to add the feature to a different project (particularly if the other projects that it would make sense to add the feature to require copyright assignment, so simply having a license to the original implementation is not sufficient). (emphasis added)
And your reply:
Posted Sep 12, 2011 16:11 UTC (Mon) by BrucePerens (subscriber, #2510) [Link]
Actually, this isn't a problem because of a key feature of copyright law: A developer is always free to grant their own work to others under his/her own terms. The covenant doesn't make you promise not to do so.
Of course the covenant doesn't "make you promise not to" - because it doesn't need to. Copyright law "makes you promise not to do so" because doing so would be against the law once you've assigned copyright to someone else (doh!).
Remember, here you've been arguing that they will only accept contributions if the copyright is assigned to them. And worse, you've admitted that you forgot to ask about the author getting a grant-back for other uses. You negotiated with their lawyer, and their lawyer got the better of you. Not much of a surprise there, I guess, after seeing the rest of your responses here and at LWN.
Sloppy, half-baked, uninspiring. You come up with all sorts of "excuses" for why LexisNexis and their owner, Reed-Elsevier, the paywall people (you know, the poor poor $9 billion market cap business needs your code to list as a business asset or they'll have big problems!!!OMG!!!), should be trusted, and *need* copyright assignment, such as "they want to be able to list the copyrights as assets".... gee, maybe we should be as generous to Rupert Murdoch, ya think?
"Actually, this isn't a problem because of a key feature of copyright law: A developer is always free to grant their own work to others under his/her own terms."
Copyright law doesn't work that way. Once you assign it to someone else, you don't have the right to make other grants w/o their permission.
So which is it - you "forgot to ask your masters", or "it's not a problem"?
Quoted further down in the thread, for those too lazy to go to lwn, along with a few choice comments as Perens tries to avoid giving a real response to the many legitimate questions that were raised here and on LWN.
Troll much, Perens? Because you really need more practice if you're not going to be caught out so easily.
Guess who can't stand the heat and wants to leave the kitchen?
It doesn't work that way, Bruce. You're telling one story here, and I just checked on lwn.com, and you're saying something completely different there there.
Posted Sep 12, 2011 15:51 UTC (Mon) by iabervon (subscriber, #722)[Link]
It seems to me that this is missing an important motivation for developers: many developers want to implement a particular feature so they themselves can use that feature. Consider, for example, a developer who has added a redundancy feature to a database so that the web site they run has better availability; their primary goal is to run the site with a database with this feature. To the extent that these developers expect to get a benefit from contributing the code to the upstream project, it is to reduce the maintenance burden (ultimately by developers considering that to be normal functionality and simply not introducing conflicts). In this situation, the covenant would ensure the worst of all possibilities in the situation where the company took the project proprietary: not only would the developer not have access to the source of future versions, but these future versions would not work for the developer, since the feature would have to be removed. Furthermore, there is a danger in the company then owning the copyright on the implementation of this feature, if the developer decides to add the feature to a different project (particularly if the other projects that it would make sense to add the feature to require copyright assignment, so simply having a license to the original implementation is not sufficient).
And your reply:
Posted Sep 12, 2011 16:11 UTC (Mon) by BrucePerens (subscriber, #2510) [Link] [Link]
Actually, this isn't a problem because of a key feature of copyright law: A developer is always free to grant their own work to others under his/her own terms. The covenant doesn't make you promise not to do so.
Here, you've been arguing that they will only accept contributions if the copyright is assigned to them. On LWN, you gloss over the implications of that, expressed by the poster on LWN, by saying that the developer is free to grant their own work to others. They cannot if they have assigned the copyright to someone else, and you d*** well know that.
If my AGPL 3.0 code gets BSD licensed, it's not the end of the world. It's still Free Software. If a company's product gets BSD licensed, it might be the end of the world for them.
Not if they have some hot new code to add that they don't want to share. Then, it's certainly to their advantage to breech the covenant and let the AGPL version be re-released under a BSD license.
The other problem is that the covenant doesn't bind 3rd parties. The parent company's other divisions are free to develop, maintain, and sell a closed version with all sorts of enhancements when LexisNexis grants them a license to do so. The open version will never see those. So the open version will be the red-headed stepchild, because for Reed-Elsevier, money does more than talk. It buys lawyers who will point out that they're in full compliance with the letter of the covenant and that you really should be grateful for that knife in the back.
You want a company to track ownership of their product per character through an ever increasing string of edits.
I get the feeling I'm wasting my time here.
You know very well that any version control system can do that. Heck, a wiki can do that. It's not that hard with derivative works (which is what edits are to existing lines) to track who checked in what. And for all-new code, you just have to look at who did the original check-in. If everyone who checks in code has already signed off on an agreement that any check-in they do is covered by them granting a specific license, what is the problem? Oh, right - this looks like it isn't about tracking code changes and copyright ownership - its about code capture via copyright assignment by throwing up artificial roadblocks to any other sort of arrangement. You're swimming with sharks. BIG sharks, as in $9 Billion sharks.
Please do your research on Reed-Elsevier (the parent company). They track copyright ownership and do rights management for so many of their print and paywall properties that they cannot claim that they don't understand the concept. It's their core business. They understand it well enough to know that they should always try to grab as many rights as they can.
If LexisNexis was giving you a contrary impression, they've yanked your chain good and hard. Here, start on the HPCC TOS page
Reed Elsevier PLC provides information solutions in the areas of science, medical, legal, risk, and business sectors primarily in North America and Europe. The company's Elsevier division publishes scientific information books and journals in print and electronic forms for scientists, academic institutions, research leaders and administrators, corporations, and governments; bibliographic data, indexes, and abstracts, as well as review and reference works; and provides abstract and citation database of research literature. This division also publishes medical journals, books, major reference works, databases, and online information solutions to health professionals and healthcare facilities; and offers marketing services to the pharmaceutical industry. The company's LexisNexis division provides data, analytics, and software services to property and casualty personal and commercial insurance carriers; and offers investigative solutions, as well as focuses on employment-related, resident, and volunteer screening solutions. This division also provides legal, tax, regulatory, and business information to law firms, corporations, and government principally through electronic services and workflow tools. The company's Reed Exhibitions division organizes exhibitions and conferences that encompass various sectors, including broadcasting, TV, music, and entertainment; building and construction; electronics and electrical engineering; engineering, manufacturing, and processing; jewellery; interior design; life sciences/pharmaceuticals; marketing; property and real estate; energy; sports and recreation; and travel. Its Reed Business Information division provides data services, and information and marketing solutions to business professionals; produces industry critical data services, lead generation tools, and online community and job sites; and publishes business magazines in various sectors. The company was founded in 1894 and is based in London, the United Kingdom.
They know how to track this sort of stuff. Really, they have people whose only job is to live and breathe
I'm the main designer of the strategy, so you can explain this to me.
1. No paperwork needed.
Um, not really. You now have a large collection of copyright holders to keep satisfied perpetually - not for just three years - and you do indeed have to keep track of them enough to know what work is your own property and what is not. And whose work is what blurs with each additional edit until the ownership of your system is undeterminable. I believe that this would be demotivating for the company.
If they're just giving a grant of use, rather than copyright assignment, then the whole "3 years" thing is redundant to keeping both parties engaged.
As for keeping track of whose property is whose, everyone else manages to do it. If they can't, they're not even amateurs, never mind professionals. The same applies to tracking edits, which are derivative works. However, if you look at who you're dealing with, they most certainly CAN track all this - parent company Reed-Elsevier has plenty of experience tracking copyrights in all their paywall and print publication properties, not just LexisNexis.
2. Keeps the original authors in the loop and engaged.
Well, let's look at the Linux kernel. Certainly there are a lot of folks in the loop and engaged, but even with that project it is very much a revolving door. Developers stay engaged long enough to get their work done and then go on to other things, leaving us to maintain their work. Or leave unintentionally. I knew one who had the entire SCSI subsystem at the time of his passing, and one who had a major filesystem when he was incarcerated. What I am trying to do is engineer a cooperation that works better than the others I know of. A really big problem is taking on the janitorial function, which the community is not able to handle on a volunteer basis. We are really lucky that we get to pay people to do that on Linux, but that is rare. I want to pay those guys reliably. I want to generate income to do that.
Reed-Elsevier already generates bundles of $$$ - they've got money to burn. They would have no reason not to pay people to handle license grants as opposed to copyright assignments, especially since the costs would be amortized among all their paywall operations, not just LexisNexis.
3. Gives the original authors less motivation to fork - even unsuccessful forks cause damage
Actually, I don't believe that forks cause damage. My experience is otherwise. If the partnership with LN doesn't work, there will be a healthy fork and that is fair. But my experience is that forks happen when the technical folks aren't allowed to do their work, and rarely for any other reason.
The fork won't be able to look for prospects to generate the same revenues by approaching other paywall operators and offering them the same licensing deal. This is what I meant by "code capture." LexisNexis, and by the same token, their parent company, Reed-Elsevier, essentially gets a monopoly on the code even after a fork because funding opportunities dry up.
4. Makes their project more attractive to potential contributors
Obviously this is something I am trying to balance so that it is sufficiently attractive to contributors while motivating the company.
The company already has the motivation - quality code and code reviews. They operate a LOT of paywalls, so the benefits to them are much more substantial than it first appears, since the cost savings are across their whole system, and not just LexisNexis.
5. The can get rid of the whole "if in 3 years..." bit as well as the questions surrounding how it would be monitored and enforced
In the case of HPCC's needs, this allows them to continue to own their entire product, and to list their entire product as an asset.
Whoa, cowboy. I smell a rat. A BIG FAT JUICY RAT!
The breed of rat that thinks "Let's get a portfolio of copyright assignments so we can list these as assets" rat that wants to be able to own other people's code so they can do an IPO or a spin-off to attract investors or inflate their balance sheet.
Looks more and more like this is not (just) about them selling their commercial product after all, and why they say that a license to use the code commercially specifically for their project is a non-starter.
Look behind the curtain - who owns LexisNexis?
Oh-oh... LexisNexis is owned by paywall god Reed-Elsevier (frequent slashdot readers will recognize - and mostly hate - the parent company). This goes way beyond LexisNexis. What sort of reaction do you think you would have gotten if you had proposed that coders just hand over their copyrights to Elsevier and Co? Maybe the same as if you had proposed they give them to Rupert Murdoch?
BTW - In 2009 employee reviews surveyed by glassdoor.com lead to LexisNexis being ranked "11th worst place to work in America".
We both know who I was referring to as the archetype;-)
And I'm glad I got a smile out of you - ultimately, I think we both want the same thing, more or less. I just don't believe that we're heading down the right road nowadays... and it may already be too late to undo the damage done - it seems to have gotten institutionalized to a certain extent.
Why not ask them why they won't respect the authors rights enough to accept just a license grant? Point out their benefits:
1. No paperwork needed
2. Keeps the original authors in the loop and engaged
3. Gives the original authors less motivation to fork - even unsuccessful forks cause damage
4. Makes their project more attractive to potential contributors
5. The can get rid of the whole "if in 3 years..." bit as well as the questions surrounding how it would be monitored and enforced
6. Doesn't prevent individual authors licensing their code to GPLv2 projects, so less of a disincentive to participate
7. They will receive sufficient rights to legally protect their commercial product.
If you go through the thread, I think you can find a few more benefits.
If they dig their heels in and insist on copyright assignment, then you'll know that it's about code capture and not about creating a relationship among equals. Or you could just point them to this article and ask THEM to respond to the individual criticisms.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you missed the "you don't even have to plug them in" part.
Combine that with simple logging thru a proxy server and you're done, because once people think a camera is keeping an eye on them all the time, they tend to not surf pr0n sites from work as much, so you have far fewer log files to go through in the end if there IS a problem.
You don't even have to plug them in - just point them at each desk and make sure they have a little blinking red LED. Remind everyone in cubicleland to welcome their security-cam-wielding pointy-haired overlords.
They really don't care how many developers they force to adopt then drop a certain technology.
After all, developer churn is *good* for them - it means keeping them on unstable ground, and trained to respond to the whole "we need a new set of tools and a new language every few years" thing.
When you saw Monkeyboy doing his dance, he was really chanting (with thought balloons in parenthasis) "Developers (are sheep)! Developers (are sheep)! Developers (are sheep)! Developers (are sheep)! Developers (are sheep)! Developers (are sheep)! Developers (are sheep)! Developers (are sheep)! Developers (are sheep)! Developers (are sheep)! Developers (are sheep)! Developers (are sheep)!"
And he's been proven right over and over and over and over. How many different toolsets have the MS crowd have to adopt while the rest of the world standardized on html+css+javascript+php+mysql+*nix as the way to deliver applications, services, and content?
Remember all those rumors of Microsoft wanting to buy Adobe?
This is payback for saying "No" to Uncle Stevie. You can be sure that if the deal had gone through, flash would not only have been supported, but integrated into the next release of IE.
We call them "politicians."
Politicians call them "voters."
The general public calls them "What are you talking about?"
The web sites call them "revenue."
The advertisers call them "warm bodies with wallets."
The regulators call them "... zzzZZZzzz ... Huh? What are you talking about? ... zzzZZZzzz ..."
Read about another or Peren's ventures, kiloboot, and note the similarities - especially the lie about requiring copyright assignment so they can sell a commercial license.
Perens knows that copyright assignment isn't required to produce a commercial product. The licensing of busybox to manufacturers should have made that point clear. He's not only aware of it (as the original author) - he even makes reverence to it in the discussion. So, why the lies?
Greed? Desperation? Lust for power? Stupidity? Pride? Entitlement? Or, to quote him from lwn, "It was the best deal I could get."
Come clean, Bruce. You've been pushing this sort of one-sided licensing scheme/scam for almost 4 years according to the wayback machine. You owe everyone, if not an apology, at least an explanation.
This is not going to go away. You wanted the attention for your "covenant" - you've got it.
HPC owns the copyrights immediately and in perpetuity upon assignment. That's how copyright assignment, as opposed to licensing, works. It's a scam.
All your points are pretty much dead-on. I think that the reason people are upset is because Perens framed this as a "great opportunity" like it was some sort of step forward in open source licensing, and that the true goals were hidden - in particular, the "they need all the copyrights to protect their product", which is an outright lie (see Novell vs SCO).
That N-L wants to be able to accumulate copyrights so that they can list them as business assets (something else Perens let slip in our arguments) is something that has nothing to do with legally "protecting their product" and everything to do with greed.
Between the FSF FUD last month over how Android is risky because of the GPLv2 and "you should encourage the linux developers to switch to the GPLv3 blah blah blah" and this, I'm sick of the whole GPL mess. So I sat down last night and wrote a first draft of the Respect the Programmer License (RPL). Use the code in any product, no requirements to redistribute, BUT, just like a book, movie, etc, do not alter it. If you want modifications to the file, collaborate with the programmer. Otherwise, write your own shim or wedge to interface between the authors work and your own.
I'm going to start using it on my stuff. It was either that or some variant of the BSD/MIT license because the stench of the freetards is getting to be a bit too much.
Generate every single possible combination of software or business method patent, and break the patent office once and for all.
Besides, everyone knows that Programmers Day is also April Fools Day ("You really believed we wouldn't change the specs AGAIN? Fooled ya!")
The Reluctant Astronaut, starring Don Knotts from 1967, has the spacecraft landing on the carrier deck, unseen, while everyone is busy looking out to sea.
Case in point was Bruce Perens lying about the real reasons for the "covenant" - that it wasn't because the company in question needed copyright assignment by coders to protect their rights, but because they want to be able to list the copyrights as assets, and that it wasn't drafted by him, but by the lawyers at NexisLexis, and "was the best he could get".
It turns out that he doesn't even know what the terms of the license really mean - he has to ask their lawyer.
I don't know ... but I think F/LOSS needs to grow up. The movement should be well out of its adolescent phase by now, and dealing with business without looking like a bunch of freetards.
Most of the community doesn't care about that particular code - we're not running paywalls like parent company Reed-Elsevier, nor are we running a few thousand servers as a data warehouse in the basement to keep the place warm during the winter months. So right now, there's not much incentive to bother.
There's no question about needing to assign copyright
The real problem is, as per the above, that Perens has stated here that you *have* to assign copyright to any code they accept, and that afterward, "you can still use it under the AGPL". Sure, you can modify it "for your own use", and distribute it under the AGPL, but LexisNexis is the only one who can give someone the right to dual-license (or only commercially license) it at that point.
Why do they need a copyright assignment instead of a grant of rights from the coder? Simple - this agreement was written by their lawyers. Whose rights do you think they're looking out for? Perens has also stated, in further response to one of my points, that they want to list all those copyrights as corporate assets. So it's not just about "protecting their product", but also fattening the corporate net worth.
Perens should know that after you assign copyright, you're not really able to do "what you want with it" except for a certain subset of "what you want". Saying you can still modify it is disengenuous. Forget about granting a commercial license to someone else if LexisNexis welches. They have 3 years AFTER you sue them and get a judgment for breech to do anything they want, and you can't do squat.
An additional problem that one poster pointed out on LWN is that not everyone would be happy to see the covenants' anti-compliance provisions triggered and their code being BSD-licensed.
The responses from Perens started off weird and ended in total BS. From "they need all the copyrights to protect their business" to claiming that it would be crazy to expect a company that does copyright management, such as parent company Reed-Elsevier, to track all edits Apparently he's never heard of version control systems.
It's not just Linux that doesn't require copyright assignment. Neither do the BSD folks. Same with the Apache license, the MIT license, etc.
Some people think that slapping "open source" on something will magically attract coders the same as manure attracts flies - it doesn't, but freetards won't accept that.Coders to work on the sort of projects that Perens is proposing cost 6 figures a head.
It takes time to get someone up to speed on the codebase, and even more time before they're able to work without an onerous amount of supervision. It can easily cost between half a million and a million per head over a couple of years, by the time you add in all the extra costs (lost productivity from others supervising, extra reviews, training, losses from those who wash out, etc.) You're not going to find those types of people willing to "give it up" to a lopsided contract drafted by Ben Dover and Phil McCavity for nothing in return except the warm fuzzies.
If Perens can't negotiate a better deal, then maybe he should have asked someone else to do so. Or maybe, like ~99% of the projects out there, it's simply not viable under those conditions.
So change the goals ... the reason to open-source it should be to get other sites exercising the code and
So let's get this straight - you don't even know what your own license means?
Oh, that's right - their lawyer wrote it, not you.
BTW: The license doesn't change any of your rights - the separate copyright assignment to your masters does.
And as you pointed out elsewhere here, they want to be able to list the copyrights as an asset, so this goes far beyond them just wanting to "protect their commercial code" and why they won't just accept the individual authors giving them a non-exclusive right to use the code in commercial products.
This whole thing is ridiculous. If you're going to push a license on people, don't you think you should understand it first?
There are plenty of posts pointing out how one-sided and/or vague this "covenant" is, and how hard it will be to actually enforce. He also admits in one reply that their lawyer, not him, wrote the license, which explains a lot.
I can understand his position - after all, it creates a job for him, so he has to advocate for it. But the terms suck.
The "supposed to" was courtesy of Microsoft, not me. They certainly wanted to keep everyone on the upgrade treadmill, and it was only because they failed to launch Longhorn on time that XP was kept alive.
Also, there's this
In other words, he got p0wned, as many of the commenters over on LWN pointed out. When you can't negotiate a good deal, get up and leave. Don't settle for a bad deal and then try to sell it to everyone - we're not stupid.
He also admitted here that he forgot to ask their lawyer about license-back provisions to people who assign their copyrights. Sloppy, sloppy work, and since this was "all he could get", don't hold your breath.
If this is your idea of the work of a "licensing professional", here's a news flash - the real world works differently. This is already a fiasco and a joke, except nobody's laughing. Such a lop-sided "covenant" is a betrayal of the ideals of open source. But don't let me keep you from drinking the kook-aid.
We raised serious concerns - he dissimulated. We proposed alternatives - he made excuses for why they wouldn't work that were facile at best, and often better characterized as disingenuous.
Before today, I had no reason not to take everything Mr. Perens says at face value. That is gone - probably forever - at this point.
Since you've bailed on answering the hard questions here let's see how you're misleading people on LWN.
A poster asked you about the implications of assigning copyrights for their code.
More specifically
And your reply:
Of course the covenant doesn't "make you promise not to" - because it doesn't need to. Copyright law "makes you promise not to do so" because doing so would be against the law once you've assigned copyright to someone else (doh!).
Remember, here you've been arguing that they will only accept contributions if the copyright is assigned to them. And worse, you've admitted that you forgot to ask about the author getting a grant-back for other uses. You negotiated with their lawyer, and their lawyer got the better of you. Not much of a surprise there, I guess, after seeing the rest of your responses here and at LWN.
And you're surprised that you're getting raked over the coals for it on both sites? Really? So much so that you have to run away?
Sloppy, half-baked, uninspiring. You come up with all sorts of "excuses" for why LexisNexis and their owner, Reed-Elsevier, the paywall people (you know, the poor poor $9 billion market cap business needs your code to list as a business asset or they'll have big problems!!!OMG!!!), should be trusted, and *need* copyright assignment, such as "they want to be able to list the copyrights as assets" .... gee, maybe we should be as generous to Rupert Murdoch, ya think?
Copyright law doesn't work that way. Once you assign it to someone else, you don't have the right to make other grants w/o their permission.
So which is it - you "forgot to ask your masters", or "it's not a problem"?
Quoted further down in the thread, for those too lazy to go to lwn, along with a few choice comments as Perens tries to avoid giving a real response to the many legitimate questions that were raised here and on LWN.
Troll much, Perens? Because you really need more practice if you're not going to be caught out so easily.
Guess who can't stand the heat and wants to leave the kitchen?
It doesn't work that way, Bruce. You're telling one story here, and I just checked on lwn.com, and you're saying something completely different there there.
http://lwn.net/Articles/458515/
More specifically
And your reply:
Here, you've been arguing that they will only accept contributions if the copyright is assigned to them. On LWN, you gloss over the implications of that, expressed by the poster on LWN, by saying that the developer is free to grant their own work to others. They cannot if they have assigned the copyright to someone else, and you d*** well know that.
This is pretty disgusting behavior on your part.
Not if they have some hot new code to add that they don't want to share. Then, it's certainly to their advantage to breech the covenant and let the AGPL version be re-released under a BSD license.
The other problem is that the covenant doesn't bind 3rd parties. The parent company's other divisions are free to develop, maintain, and sell a closed version with all sorts of enhancements when LexisNexis grants them a license to do so. The open version will never see those. So the open version will be the red-headed stepchild, because for Reed-Elsevier, money does more than talk. It buys lawyers who will point out that they're in full compliance with the letter of the covenant and that you really should be grateful for that knife in the back.
You know very well that any version control system can do that. Heck, a wiki can do that. It's not that hard with derivative works (which is what edits are to existing lines) to track who checked in what. And for all-new code, you just have to look at who did the original check-in. If everyone who checks in code has already signed off on an agreement that any check-in they do is covered by them granting a specific license, what is the problem? Oh, right - this looks like it isn't about tracking code changes and copyright ownership - its about code capture via copyright assignment by throwing up artificial roadblocks to any other sort of arrangement. You're swimming with sharks. BIG sharks, as in $9 Billion sharks.
Please do your research on Reed-Elsevier (the parent company). They track copyright ownership and do rights management for so many of their print and paywall properties that they cannot claim that they don't understand the concept. It's their core business. They understand it well enough to know that they should always try to grab as many rights as they can.
If LexisNexis was giving you a contrary impression, they've yanked your chain good and hard. Here, start on the HPCC TOS page
Who is Reed-Elsevier? Reed-Elsevier is worth over 9 billion.
Their profile
They know how to track this sort of stuff. Really, they have people whose only job is to live and breathe
If they're just giving a grant of use, rather than copyright assignment, then the whole "3 years" thing is redundant to keeping both parties engaged.
As for keeping track of whose property is whose, everyone else manages to do it. If they can't, they're not even amateurs, never mind professionals. The same applies to tracking edits, which are derivative works. However, if you look at who you're dealing with, they most certainly CAN track all this - parent company Reed-Elsevier has plenty of experience tracking copyrights in all their paywall and print publication properties, not just LexisNexis.
Reed-Elsevier already generates bundles of $$$ - they've got money to burn. They would have no reason not to pay people to handle license grants as opposed to copyright assignments, especially since the costs would be amortized among all their paywall operations, not just LexisNexis.
The fork won't be able to look for prospects to generate the same revenues by approaching other paywall operators and offering them the same licensing deal. This is what I meant by "code capture." LexisNexis, and by the same token, their parent company, Reed-Elsevier, essentially gets a monopoly on the code even after a fork because funding opportunities dry up.
The company already has the motivation - quality code and code reviews. They operate a LOT of paywalls, so the benefits to them are much more substantial than it first appears, since the cost savings are across their whole system, and not just LexisNexis.
Whoa, cowboy. I smell a rat. A BIG FAT JUICY RAT!
The breed of rat that thinks "Let's get a portfolio of copyright assignments so we can list these as assets" rat that wants to be able to own other people's code so they can do an IPO or a spin-off to attract investors or inflate their balance sheet.
Looks more and more like this is not (just) about them selling their commercial product after all, and why they say that a license to use the code commercially specifically for their project is a non-starter.
Look behind the curtain - who owns LexisNexis?
Oh-oh ... LexisNexis is owned by paywall god Reed-Elsevier (frequent slashdot readers will recognize - and mostly hate - the parent company). This goes way beyond LexisNexis. What sort of reaction do you think you would have gotten if you had proposed that coders just hand over their copyrights to Elsevier and Co? Maybe the same as if you had proposed they give them to Rupert Murdoch?
BTW - In 2009 employee reviews surveyed by glassdoor.com lead to LexisNexis being ranked "11th worst place to work in America".
This is so a non-starter ...
We both know who I was referring to as the archetype ;-)
And I'm glad I got a smile out of you - ultimately, I think we both want the same thing, more or less. I just don't believe that we're heading down the right road nowadays ... and it may already be too late to undo the damage done - it seems to have gotten institutionalized to a certain extent.
Why not ask them why they won't respect the authors rights enough to accept just a license grant? Point out their benefits: ..." bit as well as the questions surrounding how it would be monitored and enforced
1. No paperwork needed
2. Keeps the original authors in the loop and engaged
3. Gives the original authors less motivation to fork - even unsuccessful forks cause damage
4. Makes their project more attractive to potential contributors
5. The can get rid of the whole "if in 3 years
6. Doesn't prevent individual authors licensing their code to GPLv2 projects, so less of a disincentive to participate
7. They will receive sufficient rights to legally protect their commercial product.
If you go through the thread, I think you can find a few more benefits.
If they dig their heels in and insist on copyright assignment, then you'll know that it's about code capture and not about creating a relationship among equals. Or you could just point them to this article and ask THEM to respond to the individual criticisms.