skullgiver, 1 year ago

It’s important to note that the CLA does not take ownership of your commit. To quote the CLA:

(a) You retain ownership of the Copyright in Your Contribution and have the same rights to use or license the Contribution which You would have had without entering into the Agreement.

All the CLA does, is say “I agree that Canonical can use my code under another license if they want to”. Your contribution is still yours.

I would also argue that by enforcing AGPL rather than Apache, the community gets more ownership. I’d rather have seen Canonical not require a CLA so they can sell the software you’re contributing, but AGPL forces everyone but Canonical to open up their custom versions to their customers, which are free to rehost it elsewhere and help bring the changes upstream, of course.

As for ownership: LXD was started by Canonical. The name and trademark is theirs, and they control the upstream project. Like always, you can reject their terms and provide your changes under another license, but as the article states, Oracle is free to take your Apache2 changes and use them for practically any purpose as long as they put a copy of the license next to their code and give you credit. That includes selling the software. Not just Oracle either, of course; IBM/Red Hat and Oracle can do the very same.

The community should own everything.

In a perfect world I agree, but then the community should take over doing the actual work. Right now, almost all of the work on open source is done by companies and organisations such as KDE and Gnome with their own committees and politics.

Software for some products don’t have company-supplied software (i.e. Asahi Linux, although they do have parts of the Darwin kernel for reference) but those devices also often take ages to become usable. There are also plenty of projects funded by charities and such, but most of those form some kind of organisation that owns the copyright by default.

the only REALLY good company for the Linux ecosystem as of right now is Valve

They brought Linux to the mainstream by locking down most of the customisability and by promoting running proprietary software. That’s just the way things need to be, but I’m not sure if the Linux ecosystem should be that happy about these developments.

Canonical fucks us with snap

It takes two minutes to install Flatpak and remove Snap. Their apt-to-snap transition is stupid and annoying, but it’s a very minor issue.

Red Hat kills X11

Red Hat stops maintaining X.org for free now that a better replacement is (almost) ready. The community is free to set up an effort to prolong X11’s life span, of course.

Google is closed

More and more closed (mostly on Android, because as it turned out, the people taking the Android source code and distributing their own forks didn’t contribute back much), but Android and Chrome are still almost completely open. Your alternatives are iOS (closed for all but the reference kernel), Sailfish (Android app support necessary for real world use but closed and paid), Ubuntu Touch (using the Android HAL, so about as open as Android), and the various Linux distros that can barely do power management and often lack features such as “placing a call”; Google still provides some of the best open source software for mobile devices.

Google’s ChromeOS is perhaps the weird exception here, being basically a closed-ish source Linux distribution. All the components that power it (Linux, Chromium, Android) are open source, but the special sauce that makes those useful for end users is closed.

nVidia is closed and buggy

Buggy? Yes, 100%. One day I will be able to use Wayland without random stutters and crashes!

Closed? Not for recent GPUs. Starting at the GTX1650/1660, the drivers are completely open source, with only the firmware being closed like on every other GPU. The closed nature of earlier cards (which still requires something like the GPL condom) still sucks, but they’re clearly improving.