On 02/07/2014 02:58 PM, Fabian Keil wrote:
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.
It does not, I think.
Whether you prefer to release your code under a copyleft or more permissive license while still retaining the copyright yourself is a completely different matter from when you sign off your copyright without any guarantee that your code won't be released under a proprietary license.
As far as I can see it's too completely different situations; it's the assignment that makes the difference.