Contribution agreements (Re: [sldev] What is the point of firstlook and giving feedback to LL)

Justin Ryan justizin at gmail.com
Tue Apr 22 09:52:19 PDT 2008


On Mon, Apr 21, 2008 at 7:02 PM, Jesse Barnett <jessesa at gmail.com> wrote:
>

> Some will always disagree with the license, which is fine. Other view points
> keep everyone constantly thinking about an incredibly important matter. But
> you can't really
> lump the other arguments about what others think of the platform into the
> same response.
>

Telling a person that they "can't" do something they have already done
is a highly sophomoric debate tactic.  I'd also venture to say that as
is the case with many people, including my ex-wife, you parse my
communications looking for opportunities to respond, showing how smart
you are, not actually engaging in true communications.

I assure you, you are very, VERY, smart.  *pats on head*

In any case, Licensing and Agreements are about nothing but PEOPLE.

LL is sitting on more than a gold mine - though clearly distracted by
that experience - they are sitting on a thought mine, and other
thought miners, even people who've been mining for longer and may have
written some of the original code that SL is based on, are told that
they can come and mine, without pay, alongside the employees, but all
the spoils will go into LL's carts.

We can take pictures home and please pay the "guest miner fee" on the way out.

Anyway, my conclusion is that this direction will harm SL.  Experience
tells me that nothing I say can influence this decision, based on
fear, but perhaps I can use this opportunity to educate the sldev
community about the nature of Free Software.

Free Software is about copyleft, "Intellectual Wealth" for all versus
"Intellectual Property".  The spirit of this is unquestionably
violated when people claim they can call something Free Software while
designing it as private property.

I am even a bit concerned, ongoing, at RMS' growing ambivalence toward
this problem.  I am glad that the GPL is becoming popular, but its'
power seems diluted when people essentially use it as if it were a BSD
license.  If you want to take contributors' code away and do with it
what you want, use BSD, you will have no _less_ ability to derive
existing GPL codebases than you have under this contributor agreement.

If the contributor agreement were to include a clause such as RMS
proposed, I believe that would make an argument for using the GPL
here, but IMO the GPL has been nailed to a stake and had tomatoes
thrown at it by LL here.

And that's no great insult, LL, welcome to the long line of private
interests that have messed up.  You can grow from this, but I fear you
are in the infinite loop of:

  "People will always disagree."

Listen a bit closer. ;)

-- 
Justin Alan Ryan
Independent Interaction Architect
http://www.bitmonk.net/
* : +1-415-226-1199


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