+ 2014-02-07 Fri 14:58, Fabian Keil freebsd-listen@fabiankeil.de:
Fellowship of FSFE fellowship@fsfeurope.org wrote:
- Matthew Garrett criticised Canonical's contributor agreement[19]. Other copyright assignment tools, such as FSFE's Fiduciary License Agreement[20] and the GNU Project's copyright assignment, enable developers to prevent their code from being used in non-free software. In contrast, Canonical's agreement explicitly states that the company may distribute people's contributions under non-free licenses. If you value software freedom, FSFE recommends you not to sign agreements which make it possible to distribute your code under non-free licenses.
Is this recommendation, the reasoning behind it and the process that led to it documented somewhere?
The recommendation seems to imply that people who prefer or don't object to non-viral free software licenses don't value software freedom.
Hi Fabian,
First, there's no such thing as a “viral” free software license. This term does not mean anything legally, nor technically. It is simply Microsoft-propaganda from the 1990s. If you are looking for a more accurate term, simply state copyleft licenses, or if you don't like the term for its need to be defined you can use “hereditary” licenses, this is more accurate to what copyleft licenses actually do. You can also use the liberal/protective dichotomy which IMHO is quite accurate too.
Second, this is not about whether people prefer BSD/MIT-style licenses or (A/L)GPL-style. This is about assigning your copyright to an entity in a way that makes it possible for that entity to decide on their own if they want to release as proprietary software or not something that include your contribution. It may very well be possible that the whole is never released as Free Software at all, whether under a liberal license or under a protective license.
Third, to answer your question, this was discussed many times within FSFE, especially in the process that led to the FLA http://fsfe.org/activities/ftf/fla.html years ago.
As far as this bit in the newsletter goes, it was discussed including in FSFE's legal team.
In this area, the goal of FSFE is clear: management of copyright should always be done with Free Software in mind (whether BSD or GPL, it does not matter).