mrsellout, a good observation about the Canonical contributor "agreement"/Mir

In some ways feeling like Canonical uses their userbase/weight to "force" people to agree to favorable copyright waivers gets my goat
... but, it also speaks to how just how deeply Unity & Mir are "This is Our Project, Go Make Your Own"

which is not really bad, or good. just Different

counterpoints, though:
1) Canonical has been around for 9 years, and their operations do not focus on a single, specialized codebase. Caution would be easier to justify if Canonical was a fly-by-night operation that buys out someone else's GPL codebase with a strong potential to dive underwater/take it closed source to make a quick buck. Otherwise it really does quack like they simply dont want to close any doors that could otherwise be open to their tools.

2) if Canonical did dive underwater with Bazaar or something (And anyone actually truly cared about leverging bzr/Mir/Unity for their own non-ubuntu stuff) Dont you think everyone would simply pull an X.Org, fork off the last good GPLv3 release and begin "contributing" to their own fork? (really, the Only fork - since Canonical's version is now relicensed and changes no longer published publically)


i do agree overall that GPLvn with no BS "agreements" more complex than kernel.org "origin" statement is generally better for all of humanity.

Let the sheer volume of your contribution to the project provide you with the weight to do what you want with it... if you want to relicense it dont accept public contributions or be prepared to re-write a lot of SVN commits. No need to make things easy for the lawyers to Weasel away with