[Interest] Contributor agreement rundown

[Nikos Chantziaras]

On 18/04/12 11:33, John Layt wrote:
> On Wednesday 18 Apr 2012 03:55:19 Nikos Chantziaras wrote:
>> I went to register for a Gerrit account.  There I saw that I must agree
>> to a "contributor agreement".  It's very legalese, so I'm not sure if it
>> means what I think it means: Nokia can transform open source code I
>> contribute into non-open code?
>>
> ...
>>
>> The beef is the phrase "under license terms of Nokia’s choosing", which
>> can be an open license, but is not required to.
>>
>> Did I understand that correctly?
>
> Yes, you can find more details at [1].  The licence you grant Nokia is
> required for two reasons:
>
> 1) For Qt Commercial to continue supporting the commercial users with the same
> unified code base and preventing a fork.
>
> 2) For the Free Qt Foundation to allow all of Qt to be released under the BSD
> if Nokia stops releasing Qt under a free licence.  See [2] for details.
>
> It is a trade-off, but not entirely one-way.  They get to sell your code, but
> the money raised goes towards supporting Qt.

Just to make it clear: I don't have any problem whatsoever if they sell 
code.  What I find problematic is transforming said code from open to 
closed source, thus allowing others to modify it without giving back the 
modifications.

I suppose the deal with KDE to relicense under the BSD in case of a Qt 
close-up means the above problem would still be there even if 
relicensing under a proprietary license was not allowed in the agreement.

(I'm not an RMS fan, btw.  I do not believe that "all software should be 
free".  I couldn't disagree more with that statement.  I believe that 
software should be whatever its author wants it to be.)