Canonical Announces Mir Back-End For Mainline Mesa

[curaga]

Money, where?

[Hamish Wilson]

Money, where?

Most of the developers here are getting paid, as well as AMD's lawyers (for better or worse).

[onicsis]

[avoing legalese and legal jargon] What practical implications CLA (Canonical Contributor License Agreement) has to a developer who sign this agreement ?

[curaga]

Most of the developers here are getting paid, as well as AMD's lawyers (for better or worse).

Sure, but I got the impression from your previous post that there was a bounty or similar. IIRC I have only seen Intel mention they have jobs open in that area.

[curaga]

[avoing legalese and legal jargon] What practical implications CLA (Canonical Contributor License Agreement) has to a developer who sign this agreement ?

In plain english: Canonical may do anything to their work.

Including change it, sell it, modify it, remove their name from it, make it closed-source.


By signing the agreement you forfeit just about any rights to that piece of code.

[Akka]

I do not want happy-community projects which move on REALLY slowly, because of too much deciding people, too much shared code with other different projects. The hybrid-graphics support is one of the examples - the technology is quite popular for several years, yet we do not have proper support. And it's not because bad corporations dislike Linux, just because Linux can't simply support these things in easy and cheap to manage way. Yes we have emerging Wayland, but it still lacks hybrid graphics support and is in development for 5 years. Way too long. When to expect it being ready? 2016? 2018? Canonical has plans for 2014. Putting extra people and money wouldn't help, because of the lack of the control - fighting with community to add some features and remove other would take too much time and too much effort. For example: Canonical wants to throw away system tray and uses indicators to deal with programs in the background. There will be no such thing as system tray in Mir, because it only complicates the whole. Other distributions want tray, just because of "legacy programs". Conflict of goals.

Nor do I want closed-source OS which can pack inside anything, be designed terribly wrong and does surprises on every corner.

I want well designed, beautiful, OPEN product with no compromises. That's what Ubuntu's going to be.

If you consider how horny Mark is of Apple it probably not take long before you get the same mix of open and closed software as in OSX if Canonical survive some more years . And as they do their best to clone OSX why don't use the original instead of the copy?

[onicsis]

In plain english: Canonical may do anything to their work.

Including change it, sell it, modify it, remove their name from it, make it closed-source.


By signing the agreement you forfeit just about any rights to that piece of code.

So GPL-ed CLA is some kind of BSD, in a [same] way that M$ use BSD code.

[dee.]

In plain english: Canonical may do anything to their work.

Including change it, sell it, modify it, remove their name from it, make it closed-source.


By signing the agreement you forfeit just about any rights to that piece of code.

Uh, no. You still have every rights granted to you by the GPL. What the CLA does is it gives ownership of the code to Canonical, and gives them permission relicense the code to whatever they want.

But some people seem to misunderstand what "relicense" means. It means that the next version they release after relicensing is under the new license (or proprietary or whatever). The version before, the one last released under GPL, is still under GPL and nothing in the world can take it away from it. That version that is under GPL, anyone is still free to fork and take up maintaining, as long as they keep their fork under GPL.

You cannot close down GPL code, CLA or not, that's the entire point of GPL. For that matter, anyone can relicense their code, as long as every rightsholder agrees to the relicensing, just the same as Canonical. All the CLA does is it gives them the power to relicense without asking other parties - basically, it's the same as any GPL project that has only one developer, where that one developer can decide to relicense at any time at his/her own discretion. But like I said, the relicensing does not affect the code that was released earlier before the relicensing.


The CLA is kind of a red herring in this case - there are other, much better reasons to be against Mir...

[Hamish Wilson]

The CLA is kind of a red herring in this case - there are other, much better reasons to be against Mir...

Well, yes.

[Triv00ett]

I think Canonical should just drop Mir and use Wayland instead,