[Interest] Contributor agreement rundown

[Till Oliver Knoll]

2012/4/19 Nikos Chantziaras <realnc at gmail.com>:
> That is totally irrelevant to me.  If closing code doesn't happen in
> practice, then the agreement has no reason to secure that possibility.

IANAL, but let's just assume that there is a very good reason for the
owner of the software (Nokia/Digia) to keep the right to lock
everything down again and say "from now on we develop closed-source
only and take everything you provided, har har!".

And yes, when you ride on the paragraphs of the Agreement then this is
what it sais and everyone here agrees with you that "Yes, that's the
risk, that's what it means: your code /could/ fall into a black hole
and never see the daylight".

So these are the facts.

What everyone here is trying to bring across however is the following:

- The chance that this is happening is small
- Customers who pay Digia have no interest in modifying Qt itself
(they just want to make their own code closed-source and don't want to
deal with the pitfalls with L-GPL: Pay money and be done with it)
- Digia wants customers to pay for their development on Qt support and
maybe develop features, but...
- ... for practical reasons they don't want to re-fix/re-implement
those features in each iteration

Now here are the benefits for you:

- You get fixes for "unpopular bugs" that customers want to have fixed
(and pay money for it!)
- You get a framework for "free" (as in "free beer") where a lot of
-paid- work went into
- You can actually contribute to that framework

Here are the benefits for Nokia/Digia and paying customers

- They get fixes and features for free (again as in "free beer")
- They get a greater user base, meaning bugs are more likely to be
discovered (also in the development done by Digia/Nokia!) and maybe
even fixed "for free"
- A greater user base also means more people educated in Qt, so
companies have more interest in investing in this technology
- Paying customers have a "single point of complaint" (Digia) and yes,
as absurd as it may sound: some companies simply WANT to pay money
"and be done with it" - simply to have that "single point of
complaint" and the assurance that their bugs get fixed

THAT's what I meant by "win-win". In my humble opinion that is just
the "most practical way to live an open governance".

> I can also see that many people here don't value open source software.

No one here values the one more versus the other: it's just a fact
that commercial companies want to have an assurance that a) their bugs
get fixed and b) they can close their OWN code (but that has nothing
to do with Qt itself - Qt just happens to be the framework their own
code is based upon). Now Trolltech/Nokia has made a bold decision to
give that work "for free" (remember the beer?) and I am sure there was
a HUGE effort necessary within Nokia to convince management that an
"open source" ("open" in the practical sense to give away the source
code and let people actually modify it, not with the restriction that
"everything else based upon it must remain open as well") model would
be of benefit to the product. So saying that "people don't value open
source" is a bit unfair in this context.

> ... But what
> I see is people who value proprietary methodologies more than open
> source ones and who fail to understand why an open source developer
> might have huge moral issues with the agreement.

I hope by now you see the motivation behind the Agreement. If the risk
of your code being taken away is too high for you or "morally you
cannot accept the fact that this possibility even exists" then no,
this Agreement is not for you.

On the other hand if you step back a little bit and look at this
situation "from a practical standpoint" you might realise that things
are different "in real life" than what the theory (the Agreement)
states and for every party involved it is best to live according to
"give and take" (and not only take).

Your call.

Cheers, Oliver