Project Harmony decloaks

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