Bradley Kuhn: Project Harmony Considered Harmful

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.

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/

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.

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.

   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.

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

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.