Re: On the subject of Git, Bazaar, and the future of Emacs development

[Karl Fogel]

Jay Belanger <address@hidden> writes:
>> Not that onerous?  The Canonical Individual Contributor License
>> Agreement requires you to explicitly authorise Canonical to license the
>> contributed software under a proprietary license.  See section 2.3 of
>> the agreement.
>
>I don't know if onerous is the right word, but I find this incredibly
>surprising.  There is a GNU project where, if you want to contribute,
>you have to explicitly say that your contributions can be put under a
>proprietary license.
>Why would this be a GNU project?

Well, you have to agree that your contributions can be *non-exclusively*
put under a proprietary license.  Canonical's contributer agreement for
Bzr does not take away your ability to use and license your changes; it
merely _also_ grants Canonical the right to distribute them in some ways
that you might not otherwise permit by default.

So all it really does is open up an entity-specific exception to your
enforcement ability.

IMHO, the contributor agreement isn't a reason for or against Bzr being
a GNU Project.  But I'm not crystal clear on what it means to be a GNU
project, other than agreeing to say publicly "We are a GNU Project" and
be licensed under the GPL.

-K