Project Harmony decloaks [LWN.net]

Project Harmony decloaks

Posted Apr 11, 2011 16:28 UTC (Mon) by AlexHudson (guest, #41828)
Parent article: Project Harmony decloaks

Interesting that the article repeats the "has been widely derided as a secretive attempt by a specific vendor to push copyright assignment policies on the community" meme without mentioning the actual vendor involved :)

I think the main problem with this effort is that $vendor aside, there really isn't much demand for these types of documents at the copyright-assignment end of the scale. It feels like they've created a spectrum to make their end seem more acceptable, when most of the projects I can think of that use them (Fedora, Zend Framework, etc.) are clustered at the other end and many simply don't use such documents.

Seeing copyright-assignment as simply another choice on the spectrum is just plain wrong. It isn't, there's a huge divide there, and frankly it wouldn't even be appropriate (IMHO) for the FSF to be doing it if they didn't have the long history and non-corporate status that they do have.

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Project Harmony decloaks

Posted Apr 11, 2011 18:45 UTC (Mon) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]

I think you've hit on the next battle ground. For those of us who see problems with assignment policies, we'll have to decide how we deal with Harmony. When Harmony releases its final documents we'll all have to decide if we can support Harmony as a concept to simplify the legalese while at the same time continuing to speak out against the specific Harmony options which we do not find acceptable.

The real danger here is that support for the simplification aspects of Harmony will turn into an out-of-context sound bite to imply support for all Harmony options by those who want to continue to make use of assignment.

I'm not sure people who agree with Ted Tso's and who are trying to highlight the benefit of simplification and publicly praise Harmony for the simplification work will continue to be authentic voices of criticism if they also speak out against specific Harmony options. Mixed messaging about Harmony won't help to push back against an encroachment of business interests on the interests and rights of contributors.

Harmony does nothing to address the trade-offs of giving entities proprietary re-licensing rights to contributed code. The devil remains in the details, even if the language is simplified. And I think everyone should be wary of championing Harmony in the abstract. And if you do decide to champion Harmony, go out of your way to be specific about which of licensing options to lift up.

-jef

Project Harmony decloaks

Posted Apr 12, 2011 5:22 UTC (Tue) by skvidal (guest, #3094) [Link] (3 responses)

What are you talking about wrt fedora forcing copyright assignment.

the CLA and the FPCA are not copyright assignment agreements:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal:Fedora_Project_Contri...

are you referring to something else?

-sv

Project Harmony decloaks

Posted Apr 12, 2011 7:04 UTC (Tue) by AlexHudson (guest, #41828) [Link] (2 responses)

I didn't say it was a copyright assignment agreement - in fact, I specifically said it was totally different.....

Project Harmony decloaks

Posted Apr 12, 2011 13:00 UTC (Tue) by skvidal (guest, #3094) [Link]

then I must have misunderstood.

Project Harmony decloaks

Posted Apr 12, 2011 19:28 UTC (Tue) by rfontana (subscriber, #52677) [Link]

I initially read your comment the way skvidal did, though I then realized what you were saying.

Fedora, in fact, is not simply using an agreement at the other end of some spectrum of contributor agreements, in some static sense. It has actively moved away from the maximalist approach to contributor agreements represented not only by copyright assignment agreements but also by that style of CLA popularized by the Apache Software Foundation.