Canonical's Mir Project Retracts Wayland Criticism

[timothyja]

I'm just going to hijack your conversation here

Section 2.3 of Canonical's agreement says this:

Based on the grant of rights in Sections 2.1 and 2.2, if We
include Your Contribution in a Material, We may license the
Contribution under any license, including copyleft,
permissive, commercial, or proprietary licenses. As a
condition on the exercise of this right, We agree to also
license the Contribution under the terms of the license or
licenses which We are using for the Material on the
Submission Date.

They have the right to make the software proprietary, but it must be in addition the license of the software when the contribution was accepted. Unless I'm misunderstanding this, since Mir is licensed under the LGPL and GPL, they could never dual license it with a proprietary license.

If what I said is true, I'm not worried about the CLA.

You should still be worried its just saying that YOUR contribution will always be licenced under the curect licence. i.e they just have to release the source for the version your code was included in, which everyone would have access to anyway. BUT they dont need to provide the source code for the newer relicenced code. i.e You might contribute to version 1 then they release version 2 which is now closed source your change is still provided as source in version 1 so no need to release it for version 2. This is how I read it anyway.

They real issue here and something I haven't seen anyone bring up yet is:

Whats worse for software Freedom GPL software with the CLA or code licenced under MIT. My understanding is either of them can become proprietary.

[chenxiaolong]

You should still be worried its just saying that YOUR contribution will always be licenced under the curect licence. i.e they just have to release the source for the version your code was included in, which everyone would have access to anyway. BUT they dont need to provide the source code for the newer relicenced code. i.e You might contribute to version 1 then they release version 2 which is now closed source your change is still provided as source in version 1 so no need to release it for version 2. This is how I read it anyway.

Thanks for the clarification! Since they require everybody to sign the CLA, wouldn't they have to rewrite the entire software (or at least a significant part of it) for the version 2 in your example in order to relicense it?

They real issue here and something I haven't seen anyone bring up yet is:

Whats worse for software Freedom GPL software with the CLA or code licenced under MIT. My understanding is either of them can become proprietary.

That's a very good point. It's kind of hard to decide until one of them happens though.

[Hamish Wilson]

I am sorry, but I do not buy this "Ubuntu is the only sane Linux desktop" garbage. It has certainly not stopped me from having a pretty much fantastic desktop experience with other distros, or having other people use them who are even less technically competent and not encountering these serious problems you all speak of in ominous hushed tones. Step off your soap-boxes and realize that Ubuntu is not god's gift to earth. No, this is not an attack on Ubuntu, this is an attack on egos. Ubuntu is simply not that different from anything else, and never was.

[timothyja]

Thanks for the clarification! Since they require everybody to sign the CLA, wouldn't they have to rewrite the entire software (or at least a significant part of it) for the version 2 in your example in order to relicense it?

Again this is just my understanding someone correct me if I'm wrong. But the key part is "We agree to also license the Contribution under the terms of the license or licenses which We are using for the Material on the Submission Date. "

The word "also" is very important. Continuing with my example version 2 is under a closed source licence but they "also" have the code licenced under the GPL but that happens to be version 1 of the software. They no longer have to release changes to your code because version 2 is under a different licence.

If you change the wording to “only” it would now become interpreted the way I think you have mistakenly done. e.g We agree to only license the Contribution under the terms of the license or licenses which We are using for the Material on the Submission Date.

[timothyja]

Again this is just my understanding someone correct me if I'm wrong. But the key part is "We agree to also license the Contribution under the terms of the license or licenses which We are using for the Material on the Submission Date. "

The word "also" is very important. Continuing with my example version 2 is under a closed source licence but they "also" have the code licenced under the GPL but that happens to be version 1 of the software. They no longer have to release changes to your code because version 2 is under a different licence.

If you change the wording to “only” it would now become interpreted the way I think you have mistakenly done. e.g We agree to only license the Contribution under the terms of the license or licenses which We are using for the Material on the Submission Date.

To continue on the other important wording is "the Contribution" not the contribution and any future changes to it (which is what the GPL usually means). This is why having only version1 of the software under GPL would be enough.
I guess this is what makes people so angery the MIT licence is the MIT licence. But the GPL with CLA is not really the GPL. A wolf in sheeps clothing is a pretty good fitting anology here.
This has all happened before, I believe that Sun used to have a similar thing when accepting contributions to OpenOffice this is how Oracle was able to relicense it to an Apache licence. It’s also partly blamed for why OpenOffice never really caught up to Microsoft Office as it discouraged people contributing. Just look at the speed of change in the LibreOffice fork without such a restriction.

[GreatEmerald]

Hmm, interesting. It looks like the GPL+CLA is still a bit better than MIT. From the perspective of Canonical, GPL+CLA is MIT. But from the perspective of everyone else, GPL+CLA is GPL. As long as Canonical does not exercise their right to relicense the code (or suffers an existence failure), it's just as good as standard GPL. On the other hand, anyone in the world can close down MIT software.

[chenxiaolong]

@timothyja: Thank you very much for the explanations!

Canonical has yet to relicense any of their projects under proprietary license. Let's hope they never do.

EDIT: I don't think that Canonical would ever make Mir proprietary, nor do I think anyone would withhold any modified source code to Wayland. That would severely hamper the adoption of the display server (at least to me).

[asdfblah]

So, the way I (a simple user, and a phoronix reader) see it is:
A. Canonical has a lot of money and they want to spend it in *something*, whatever something means... and/or
B. Someone just got convinced that Mir would be a great idea to invest in, compared to wayland, and/or
C. There have been a lot of miscomprehension and even scare from inexperienced developers in talking to wayland people (typical in the linux world, really. have you ever been told to RTFM? (; ), and/or
D. This is completely a (really bad) marketing move.

In any case, they shoot themselves in the foot, and the community won't allow this stupidity (I hope...).
I'm a long time Lubuntu user (originally Kubuntu user), but I would totally boicot canonical if they continue with this and other things (I haven't touched Unity, rolling release, wtf? PPAs are full of bugs. no, thanks...).

[Luke_Wolf]

I am sorry, but I do not buy this "Ubuntu is the only sane Linux desktop" garbage. It has certainly not stopped me from having a pretty much fantastic desktop experience with other distros, or having other people use them who are even less technically competent and not encountering these serious problems you all speak of in ominous hushed tones. Step off your soap-boxes and realize that Ubuntu is not god's gift to earth. No, this is not an attack on Ubuntu, this is an attack on egos. Ubuntu is simply not that different from anything else, and never was.

This ^ and to be honest I'm not sure just what is supposed to be so great about ubuntu, I mean yes they've got a nice gui package manager and they have jockey but beyond that it doesn't really have anything over other debian derivatives and the other families of Fedora, openSUSE, and Mageia (I'm going to ignore arch, slack, and gentoo for the moment) provide features over Ubuntu in terms of tools, you can argue about repo size for all but openSUSE, but if everything you use is in the repos well it doesn't matter how big it is now does it? so given that everything else is more or less the same as far as an new end user cares about other than DE defaults, the remaining difference essentially comes down to tools, For fedora you've got the system-config-* set, for openSUSE you have YaST and for Mageia you have I think it's called drakeconf, and they all have the ability to do graphical configuration of things Ubuntu forces you to the command line for, and thus are more user-friendly in those instances because of it. openSUSE gets bonus points for One-Click installs. Ultimately for new users though I'm going to tend to hook them up with the unofficial openSUSE guide (opensuse has good documentation with things like this) http://opensuse-guide.org/ and an install of openSUSE with KDE and let them have fun with it.

[phoen1x]

I am sorry, but I do not buy this "Ubuntu is the only sane Linux desktop" garbage. It has certainly not stopped me from having a pretty much fantastic desktop experience with other distros, or having other people use them who are even less technically competent and not encountering these serious problems you all speak of in ominous hushed tones. Step off your soap-boxes and realize that Ubuntu is not god's gift to earth. No, this is not an attack on Ubuntu, this is an attack on egos. Ubuntu is simply not that different from anything else, and never was.

That's the whole point. Ubuntu is crap, never was good at anything. It's just hyped crap distro, that sucks everything from others and gives nothing in return yet they take all the glory for themselves. Remember canonical sending like millions of ubuntu CD's? Yes that's how they started to attract people, a lot of people didn't even cared about linux they just wanted shiny CD for free or lots of shiny CD's for free. There are distributions like mandrake(now mandriva) opensuse, fedora, etc, and all of them are as easy as ubuntu, but people/companies behind those distributions weren't giving away millions of free CD's to attract people. It's all about money for canonical and that's it. They want money, like every human being on a god damn planet EARTH. But Red Hat did it in the proper way they create good stuff for everybody and earn money. While canonical just sucks everyone's hard work and gives nothing in return.