While Trolltech did accept contributions those patches went into BOTH the commercial and open source versions which is not keeping code for themselves.

The commercial addons are negligible as I recall, mostly dealing with windows specific wrappers (activex?). I could be remembering incorrectly of course

Fedora’s CLA is now a click through in the updated Fedora account system when creating a Fedora Account. And on top of that its only necessary for a subset of possible Fedora project roles.

And I think you have some misconceptions about what Fedora’s contributor agreement actually does.

Fedora doesn’t have mandatory copyright assignments at all anywhere as far as I know. What Fedora has is a license agreement to ensure that Fedora can continue to make use of all types of contributed content..not just traditional source code that tends to come with a license already. That agreement is there to ensure a license agreement in place with every contributor so as content is contributed the Fedora project has an explicit license to continue to modify and distribute it. Fedora certainly does not make any effort to “own” your contributions.

I’ll note that this is in contrast with how Canonical does things.
http://www.canonical.com/contributors

Every single one of the projects listed on that page require you to sign over copyright ownership to Canonical before you can contribute to the codebase. The Ubuntu situation is not as cut and dry as you make it out to be. Canonical does require copyright assignment for software Canonical takes a lead development role in, including things like bzr and upstart and the yet to be open sourced launchpad.

If Canonical wanted to create a purely commercial bzr, they could as they own all the copyright assignments. Or more realistically if they wanted to in the future take community written code contributed to Rosetta component of launchpad after its released as open source and re-use it in the still proprietary Soyuz component..they will be able to as they will require copyright assignment to Canonical for all code contributions.

-jef

Alex: Please re-read what I said. Trolltech sold a commercial version, which included a small number of community contributions received from people who assigned copyright. This is indisputable. It’s objective fact. The developers who made patch submissions and signed the copyright assignment were obviously OK with that. I never said otherwise.

Tom: I specifically talked about Trolltech, in the context of dual licencing models, obviously this no longer applies in the era of Nokia & QT Software. And, for your information, many many companies work on Asterisk, not just Digium. I mentioned Digium in relation to Trolltech as a company which also used a dual licencing commercial/GPL business model with a different “community edition” and “enterprise edition”.

Bluebird: Yes, Trolltech shared the crown jewels. But they also integrated external contributions in the QT Commercial Edition. I didn’t say that they were *wrong* or *evil* for doing so. I am simply saying that this is how it was. When a company asks you to sign a copyright assignment, you have to consider whether this is something you’re OK with. That is *all* I am saying.

So, when you remove the shitty AUTOTOOLS (in favor or CMake or other), maybe you’ll get more developers in Gnome.

And even then, when they adopted some large chunk of community code, e.g., Phonon, they kept it under its LGPL license, even for the commercial offerings.

The contract I received from the FSF had several scary (liability) clauses that I could not in good faith sign.

The big effect of this on the the GNU project is “cleanroom implementation” software, rather than “standing on the shoulders of giants” software.

Imagine if they simply decided they didn’t want copyright assignment, how much longer would it have taken to go LGPL… or how would they license commercial versions for commercial support, which by the way *pays* their small army of developers and support staff so that, me, being a paying customer, can call and get answers to lots of questions in a few hours instead of days hunting on mailing lists. Can call up and say “hey here’s a bug from me, a paying customer, fix it now” and get a patch in a day that I didn’t myself have to write. I don’t mind paying the cost for such a service when I’m trying to make money by focusing on the app I’m writting not figuring out why libraries are broken on some platform under certain conditions. They also happen to pay several developers for open source projects as well through those “evil” commercial licenses. So really, I don’t see this as a bad thing.

Furthermore, even if they simply took their cookies back, the cats out of the bag and it’ll never go back in. Qt is widely used as is GTK+, do you really think that suddenly Qt would disappear as a LGPL entity? Highly highly unlikely. Comparing it with Digium, something only one company works on and really uses/supports vs a library that thousands of people use is really just not the same.

If your going to troll on some group over copyright assignment, I’d troll on FSF the heaviest for their incredulous “we reserve the right to update the license” crap. For a community run entity thats acceptable but somehow for a corporate entity its now an evil thing? Even when after a decade of FOSS has been built around the entities main product? Really? Maybe for Digium and SugarCRM this is a more serious issue, and I agree copyright assignment to such entities can lead to possible reversal of policies and what then… will people really carry on the torch for those projects, thats the question to ask. In Qt’s case its a clear Yes. In Digium’s and SugarCRM’s maybe not so much.