Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/10/17/shuttleworth-admits-it.html

I’ve
written before about my deep skepticism regarding the true motives
of Canonical, Ltd.’s advocacy and demand of for-profit corporate
copyright assignment without promises to adhere
to copyleft. I’ve
often asked Canonical employees,
including Jono
Bacon, Amanda
Brock, Jane
Silber, Mark
Shuttleworth himself, and —
in the
comments of this very blog post
— Matt Asay to
explain (a) why exactly
they demand copyright
assignment on their projects, rather than merely having contributors
agree to the GNU
GPL formally (like
projects such as Linux do), and (b) why, having received a contributor’s
copyright assignment, Canonical, Ltd. refuses to promise
to keep the software copylefted and never proprietarize it
(FSF, for example, has always done the latter in assignments). When I
ask these questions of Canonical, Ltd. employees, they invariably
artfully change the subject.

I’ve actually been asking these questions for at least a year and a
half, but I really began to get worried earlier this year
when Mark
Shuttleworth falsely claimed that Canonical, Ltd.’s copyright
assignment was no different than the FSF’s copyright assignment.
That event made it clear to me that there was a job of salesmanship
going on: Canonical, Ltd. was trying to sell something to community that
the community doesn’t want nor need, and trying to reuse the good name
of other people and organizations to do it.

Since that interview in February, Canonical, Ltd. has launched a
manipulatively named product called
“Project
Harmony”. They market this product as a “summit”
of sorts — purported to have no determined agenda other than
to discuss the issue of contributor agreements and copyright
assignment, and come to a community consensus on this. Their
goal, however, was merely to get community members to lend their good
names to the process. Indeed, Canonical, Ltd. has oft attempted to use
the involvement of good people to make it seem as if Canonical, Ltd.’s
agenda is endorsed by many. In
fact, FSF
recently distanced itself from the process because of Canonical,
Ltd.’s actions in this
regard. Simon
Phipps had similarly distanced himself before that.

Nevertheless, it seems Canonical, Ltd. now believes that they’ve
succeed in their sales job, because they’ve now confessed their true
motive. In
an IRC
Q&A session last
Thursday⁰, Shuttleworth
finally admits that his goal is to increase the amount
of “Open
Core” activity. Specifically, Shuttleworth says at 15:21 (and
following):

[C]ompare Qt and Gtk, Qt has a contribution agreement, Gtk doesn’t, for a
while, back in the bubble, Sun, Red Hat, Ximian and many other companies
threw money at Gtk and it grew and improved very quickly but, then they
lost interest, and it has stagnated. Qt was owned by Trolltech it was open
source (GPL) but because of the contribution agreement they had many
options including proprietary licensing, which is just fine with me
alongside the GPL and later, because they owned Qt completely, they were
an attractive acquisition for Nokia, All in all, the Qt ecosystem has
benefitted and the Gtk ecosystem hasn’t.

It takes some careful analysis to parse what’s going on here. First of
all, Shuttleworth is glossing over a lot of complicated Qt history. Qt
started with a non-FaiF
license (QPL),
which later
became a GPL-incompatible Free Software license. After a few years
of this
oddball, license-proliferation-style
software freedom license, Trolltech stumbled upon the “Open
Core” model (likely inspired by MySQL AB), and switched to GPL.
When Nokia
bought Trolltech, Nokia itself discovered that full-on “Open Core”
was bad for the code base, and
(as I
heralded at the
time) relicensed
the codebase to LGPL (the same license used by Gtk). A few
months after that, Nokia
abandoned
copyright assignment completely for Qt as well! (I.e., Shuttleworth
is just wrong on this point entirely.) In fact, Shuttleworth, rather
than supporting his pro-Open-Core argument, actually gave the prime
example of Nokia/TrollTech’s lesson learned: “don’t do an
Open-Core-style contributor agreement, you’ll regret it”.
(RMS
also
recently published
a good essay on this subject).

Furthermore, Shuttleworth also ignores completely plenty of historical angst in
communities that rely on Qt, which often had difficulty getting bugfixes
upstream and other such challenges when dealing with a for-profit
controlled “Open Core” library. (These were, in fact, among the
reasons Nokia
gave in May 2009 for the change in policy). Indeed, if the proprietary
relicensing business is what made Trolltech such a lucrative acquisition
for Nokia, why did they abandon the business model entirely within four
months of the acquisition?

Although, Shuttleworth’s “lucrative acquisition” point has
some validity. Namely, “Open Core” makes wealthy,
profit-driven types (e.g.,
VCs) drool. Meanwhile,
people like
me,
Simon
Phipps, NASA’s
Chris
Kemp, John
Mark Walker, Tarus
Balog and many others are either very skeptical about “Open Core”, or
dead-set against it. The reason it’s meeting with so much opposition is
because “Open Core” is a VC-friendly way to control all the
copyright “assets” while pretending to actually have the
goal of building an Open Source community. The real goal of “Open
Core”, of course, is a bait-and-switch move. (Details on that are
beyond the scope of this post and well covered in the links I’ve
given.)

As to Shuttleworth’s argument of Gtk stagnation, after
my trip
this past summer to GUADEC, I’m quite convinced that the GNOME
community is extremely healthy. Indeed,
as Dave
Neary’s GNOME Census shows, the GNOME codebases are well-contributed
to by various corporate entities and (more importantly) volunteers.
For-profit corporate folks like Shuttleworth and his executives tend not
to like communities where a non-profit (in this case,
the GNOME Foundation)
shepherds a project and keeps the multiple for-profit interests at bay.
In fact, he dislikes this so much that when GNOME was
recently documenting
its long standing copyright policies, he sent Silber to the GNOME
Advisory Board (the first and only time Canonical, Ltd. sent such a high
profile person to the Advisory Board) to argue against
the long-standing GNOME community preference for no
copyright assignment on its
projects¹.
Silber’s primary argument was that it was unreasonable for individual
contributors to even ask to keep their own copyrights, since
Canonical, Ltd. puts in the bulk of the work on their projects that
require copyright assignment. Her argument was, in other words, an
anti-software-freedom equality argument: a for-profit company is more
valuable to the community than the individual contributor. Fortunately,
GNOME Foundation didn’t fall for this, continued its work with Intel to
get the Clutter codebase free of copyright assignment (and that work has
since succeeded). It’s also particularly ironic that, a few months
later, Neary showed that the very company making that argument
contributes 22% less to the GNOME codebase than the volunteers
Silber once argued don’t contribute enough to warrant keeping their
copyrights.

So, why have Shuttleworth and his staff been on a year-long campaign to
convince everyone to embrace “Open Core” and give up all
their rights that copyleft provides? Well, in the same IRC log (at
15:15) I quoted above, Shuttleworth admits that he has some work
left to do to make Canonical, Ltd. profitable. And therein lies the
connection: Shuttleworth admits Canonical, Ltd.’s profitability is a
major goal (which is probably obvious). Then, in his next answer, he
explains at great length how lucrative and important “Open
Core” is. We should accept “Open Core”, Shuttleworth
argues, merely because it’s so important that Canonical, Ltd. be
profitable.

Shuttleworth’s argument reminds me of a story
that Michael Moore (who
famously made the
documentary Roger and Me, and has since made other
documentaries) told at a book-signing in the mid-1990s. Moore said (I’m
paraphrasing from memory here, BTW):

Inevitably, I end up on planes next to some corporate executive. They
look at me a few times, and then say: Hey, I know you, you’re Roger
Moore [audience laughs]. What I want to know, is what the hell have you
got against profit? What’s wrong with profit, anyway? The
answer I give is simple: There’s nothing wrong with profit at all. The
question I’m raising is: What lengths are acceptable to achieve profit?
We all agree that we can’t exploit child labor and other such things, even
if that helps profitability. Yet, once upon a time, these sorts of
horrible policies were acceptable for corporations. So, my point is that
we still need more changes to balance the push for profit with what’s
right for workers.

I quote this at length to make it abundantly clear: I’m not opposed to
Canonical, Ltd. making a profit by supporting software freedom. I’m
glad that Shuttleworth has contributed a non-trivial part of his
personal wealth to start a company that employs many excellent
FLOSS
developers (and even sometimes lets those developers work on upstream
projects). But the question really is: Are the values of software
freedom worth giving up merely to make Canonical, Ltd. profitable?
Should we just accept
that proprietary
network services like UbuntuOne, integrated on nearly every menu of
the desktop, as reasonable merely because it might help Canonical,
Ltd. make a few bucks? Do we think we should abandon copyleft’s
assurances of fair treatment to all, and hand over full
proprietarization powers on GPL’d software to for-profit companies,
merely so they can employ a few FLOSS developers to work primarily on
non-upstream projects?

I don’t think so. I’m often critical of Red Hat, but one thing they do
get right in this regard is a healthy encouragement of their developers
to start, contribute to, and maintain upstream projects that live in the
community rather than inside Red Hat. Red Hat currently allows its
engineers to keep their own copyrights and license them under whatever
license the upstream project uses, binding them to the terms of the
copyleft licenses (when the upstream project is copylefted). For
projects generated inside Red Hat,
after experimenting
with the sorts of CLAs that I’m complaining about,
they learned
from the mistake and corrected it (although
unfortunately, Red
Hat hasn’t universally corrected the problem). For the most part,
Red Hat encourages outside contributors to give under their own
copyright under the outbound license Red Hat chose for its projects
(some of which are also copylefted). Red Hat’s newer policies have some
flaws (details of which are beyond the scope of this post), but it’s
orders of magnitude better than the copyright assignment intimidation
tactics that other companies, like Canonical, Ltd., now employ.

So, don’t let a friendly name like “Harmony” fool you.
Our community has some key infrastructure, such as the copyleft itself,
that
actually keeps us harmonious.
Contributor
agreements aren’t created equal, and therefore we should oppose the
idea that contributor and assignment agreements should be set to the
lowest common denominator to enable a for-profit corporate land-grab
that Shuttleworth and other “Open Core” proponents seek.
I also strongly advise the organizations and individuals who are
assisting Canonical, Ltd. in this goal to stop immediately,
particularly now that Shuttleworth has announced his “Open
Core” plans.

---

Update (2010-10-18): In comments, many people have,
quite correctly, argued that I have not proved that Canonical,
Ltd. has plans to go “Open Core” with their
copyright-assigned copyleft products. Such comments are correct; I
intended this article to be an opinion piece, not a logical proof. I
further agree that without absolute proof, the title of
this blog post is an exaggeration. (I didn’t change it, as that seemed
disingenuous after the fact).

Anyway, to be clear, the only thing the chain of events described
above prove is that Canonical, Ltd. wants “Open
Core” as a possibility for the future. That part is
trivially true: if they didn’t want to reserve the possibility, they’d
simply make a promise-back to keep the software as Free Software in
their assignment. The only reason not to make an
FSF-style promise-back is that you want to reserve the
possibility of proprietary relicensing.

Meanwhile, even though I cannot construct a logical proof of it, I
still believe the only possible explanation for this 1+ year marketing
campaign described above is that Canonical, Ltd. is moving toward
“Open Core” for those projects on which they are the sole
copyright holder. I have asked others to offer alternative
explanations of why Canonical, Ltd. is carrying out this campaign: I
agree that there could exist another logical explanation other than the
one I’ve presented. If someone can come up with one, then I would be
happy to link to it here.

Finally, if Canonical, Ltd. comes out with a statement that they’ll
switch to using FSF’s promise-back in their assignments, I will be very
happy to admit I was wrong. The outcome I want is for individual
developers to be treated right by corporations in control of particular
codebases; I would much rather that happen than be correct in my
opinions.

---

⁰I
originally credited OMG Ubuntu
as publishing
Shutleworth’s comments as an interview. Their reformatting
of his comments temporarily confused me, and I thought they’d
done an interview. Thanks
to @gotunandan who
pointed this out.

¹Ironically, the
debate had nothing to do with a Canonical, Ltd. codebase, since their
contributions amount to so little (1%) of the GNOME codebase anyway.
The debate was about the Clutter/Intel situation, which has since been
resolved.

---

Responses Not In the Identica Thread:

• Alex
  Hudson’s blog post
• Discussion on
  Hacker News
• LWN comments
• Matt
  Aslett’s response
  and my
  response to him
• Ingolf
  Schaefer’s blog post, which only allows comments with a Google
  Account, so I comment below instead (to be clear, I’m not criticizing
  Ingolf’s choice of Google-account-to-comment, especially since I make
  everyone who wants to comment here sign up for identi.ca ;):

  Ingolf, you noted that you’d rather I not try to read between the lines
  to deduce that proprietary relicensing and/or “Open Core” is
  where Canonical, Ltd.’s marketing is leading. I disagree; I think it’s
  useful to consider what seems a likely end-outcome here. My primary
  goal is to draw attention to it now in hopes of preventing it from
  happening. My best possible outcome is that I get proved wrong, and
  Canonical makes a promise-back in their assignment and/or CLA.

  Meanwhile, I don’t think they can go “Open Core”
  and/or proprietary relicensing for all of Ubuntu, as you are saying.
  They aren’t sole copyright holder in most of Ubuntu. The places where
  they can pursue these options is in Launchpad, pbuilder, upstart, and
  the other projects that require CLA and/or assignment.

  I don’t know for sure that they’ll do this, as I say above. I can
  deduce no other explanation. As I keep saying, if someone else has
  another possible explanation for Canonical, Ltd.’s behavior that I list
  above, I’m happy to link to it here. I can’t see any other reason;
  they’d surely by now just made an FSF-style promise-back in their CLA if
  they didn’t want to hold proprietarization as a possibility.