On 19.05.2016 18:28, David Cramblett wrote:
> If you read this (from Linux kernel link provided):
> 
> |(d) I understand and agree that this project and the contribution are
> public and that a record of the contribution (including all personal
> information I submit with it, including my sign-off) is maintained
> indefinitely and may be redistributed consistent with this project or
> the open source license(s) involved.|
> 
> 
> It's kind of splitting hairs to say they don't require CLA, "it's a
> Certificate of Origin". It's essentially accomplishing the same goal.

No, definitively not. With a CLA, I give up my copyright. I have no
rights on the code submitted anymore and the entity that I had to
transfer my copyrights to can do with my contribution as it pleases.
They can even go closed source.

The (d) point you cited above just informs me that anyone can look up my
contribution as it will be publicly available indefinitely.


> The developer is agreeing that the patch belongs to the project and may
> be redistributed indefinitely.

Where does it say that?

> I'm not particularly concerned one way or the other. If any evil person
> or company tries to convert a useful OSS project into a pay-for software
> (or do other disruptive things), the community is going to fork the
> project and move on, e.g. LibreOffice, MariaDB, etc.

There is no easy way to prohibit this. Look at The Gimp, for example:
There are dozens of outlets on the internet that _sell_ precompiled
versions, sometimes "enhanced" with add ware and sometimes even under
the "Photoshop" label.

As a side note, even the current infrastructure supplier of BackupPC,
sourceforge.net, is known to do such things. Just google "sourceforge
grabs gimp".

Now, the GPL does not prohibit to sell software. It demands that you
have to make the source code available and that you can not mix GPL with
non GPL software (oversimplified, I know). But you actually are allowed
to charge for compilation, media, documentation, support and so on.

How can an open source project defend against the misuse of their project?

Mostly by making sure the source code stays open source. Try to attract
as many contributors as possible so the number of copyright holders make
it improbable that the source is taken over.

In the case of BackupPC, the risk of misuse is small: The target
audience are system administrators who will not download BackupPC from
some shady operation for a handful of megabucks if they can install it
from their OS repository for free. So another target would be to closely
cooperate with OS package maintainers in order to make the inclusion of
BackupPC as hassle free for them as possible.

Most OS packagers carry patches for the packages the maintain. Some of
the patches are distribution specific, some are bug fixes, some are even
functional extensions. And all package maintainers would prefer if they
would not have to carry these patches because these may break and the
maintainer then has to redo them for every new release of the upstream
project. So, harvesting these patches and incorporate them into the main
BackupPC source makes sure we stay in the distribution.

Another thing most OS packagers do is accepting bug reports. We should
harvest these bug reports and fix the issues in our source code. The
more bug reports a maintainer can close with a "fixed upstream" notice,
the better the reputation of a project is and the larger the chances of
a project to stay in the distribution (or even get a special exposure in
the distribution) are.

With kind regards

Stefan Peter

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