
Bradley Kuhn: Project Harmony Considered Harmful - ssp
http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2011/07/07/harmony-harmful.html
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btilly
td;lr version:

A bunch of corporate lawyers have created a set of proposed license agreements
for use with free software that they named _Project Harmony_. The main effect
of these agreements is to provide a lot of protection to corporations, while
giving the corporations subtle outs to let them violate the free software
licenses that you thought everyone was bound by.

Here is my personal opinion on the arguments given.

\- If you believe in strong copyleft, the arguments are likely to be
persuasive.

\- If you're more in the "let me write code, I don't care what people do with
it" BSD school, the agreements are going to seem much weaker.

\- If you're a company, the agreements will seem like a good thing, IF you can
get developers to agree to it.

\- If you're a company who wants to pursue a dual licensing strategy
(available for all under the GPL, but you can license to other people under a
commercial license), the agreements would be an excellent thing.

As for me, personally? I understand what they are for, but don't want to
bother with them if I don't have to. There is too little value added for me,
personally.

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rkalla
I didn't know what Project Harmony even was and that article doesn't clear it
up in the first few paragraphs. For anyone else fuzzy as well, it looks to be
"a standardized set of contributor agreements (to the linux kernel)"[1]

[1] <http://lwn.net/Articles/450543/>

~~~
corbet
Actually, the kernel is one place where you'll not see Harmony's work at all;
these agreements are meant to be applied to a lot of other projects. Canonical
is pushing for them, but is not alone in that effort.

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jrockway
Yeah, fuck this. If a for-profit entity needs you to sign a copyright
assignment, ask for money. Otherwise, just fork the project. People are smart
and will find the Free version. Remember "Hudson", the Java CI project?
Neither do I. Remember OpenOffice.Org? Neither do I.

It's nice for companies to sponsor free software development, but in doing so,
they should play by the same rules as everyone else. Otherwise, it's work, not
a community project.

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abrahamsen
The article would be far more readable if he split it up in two:

1) An article about why the Project Harmony contracts are considered harmful.

2) A separate article about why the seemingly similar contracts used by the
FSF are acceptable.

Also, some words and a link about what "Project Harmony" is and who is behind
it would be nice.

<http://harmonyagreements.org/>

From what I gather, Canonical (Ubuntu) is the driving force.

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tzs

       Most lawyers just love a “choice of law” clause for various
       reasons. The biggest reason is that it means the rules that
       apply to the agreement are the ones with which the lawyers
       are most familiar, and the jurisdiction for disputes will be
       the local jurisdiction of the company, not of the developer.
    

Choice of law clauses do not determine the jurisdiction for disputes. They
just say that particular jurisdiction's law will be used to interpret the
contract.

To specify jurisdiction to hear the dispute, you need a forum selection
clause.

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sciurus
If you want to know more background on Project Harmony, read "Project Harmony
Decloaks" at <https://lwn.net/Articles/437734/>

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smackfu
Oddly I have a irrational reaction to him using the abbreviation ©AA as being
like M$. I know it's not, but mixing symbols and letters just feels wrong.

