[Harmony-Review] Feedback

Scott James Remnant scott at netsplit.com
Wed May 4 23:36:45 UTC 2011


On Wed, May 4, 2011 at 1:51 PM, Allison Randal <allison at lohutok.net> wrote:


> To provide some general context here, I'll repeat an important bit from the
> Harmony website: A contributor agreement is only one (optional) part of an
> overall legal strategy for a project. On the website we emphasized the point
> that this means projects may not choose to use them at all. The other half
> is that a contributor agreement cannot stand alone as the *only* part of the
> project's legal strategy. Projects need to make several choices about
> outbound license, submission procedures, when to require contributor
> agreements, how to accept them, governance models (including developer and
> member representation in technical and non-technical decisions), and more.
>
> Since Canonical is the sole copyright holder of the project in question,
not me, I can't make these decisions.

Canonical has chosen GPLv2 and Harmony Option Five.


> But, I also think that FLOSS has an important role to play in discouraging
> bad behavior around software patents. The relevant "best practice" forming
> in the FLOSS legal community around patent licenses seems to be "termination
> for litigation", as seen in the Apache 2.0 license, the Apache contributor
> agreement, the Artistic 2.0 license, the Perl and Parrot contributor
> agreements, and (less clearly) in GPLv3. Here's the text from the Apache
> CLA:


I proposed the Apache 2.0 license to Canonical, they refused.

Scott
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