[Harmony-Review] Feedback

Scott James Remnant scott at netsplit.com
Tue Apr 26 22:16:56 UTC 2011


>From discussion about replacing the existing Canonical CLA with the Harmony
one for Upstart:

   - the Harmony agreements are clearly written by a lawyer for a lawyer.
   But they're not intended to be given to lawyers, they are intended to be
   given to ordinary people who are expected to be able to understand them
   sufficiently to make a decision about their rights. Requiring every
   contributor to hire a lawyer is nonsensical and absolutely does not meet any
   "ease of contribution" requirements.
   - this is also true of the copyright license itself, be it GPL, BSD or
   Apache - but those have been around longer, are better understood and
   summarised and are necessary in of themselves. Adding a second legal
   document on top is not just doubling the problem, but understanding the
   interaction squares it ;-)
   - the right to sub-license the Contribution is granted from Contributor
   to Canonical, but no reciprocal right is granted for the Work as a whole
   back to the Contributor (ie. the right to sub-license is exclusive to
   Canonical)
   - the patent rights associated with the Contribution are granted from
   Contributor to Canonical, but no reciprocal rights are granted for the Work
   as a whole back to the Contributor (ie. patent rights are exclusive to
   Canonical)
   - in addition, no patent rights are granted for the Work as a whole back
   to an ordinary User, combined with the GPLv2 this is a nuclear event should
   the rights pass to an evil holder
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.harmonyagreements.org/pipermail/harmony-review/attachments/20110426/5db2abc8/attachment.html>


More information about the Harmony-Review mailing list