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My mind's been lingering on that whole contract or whatever bullshit to contribute to OWS stuff and I don't know, it just seems so heavy-handed. I can accept that a project will want to be given a non-exclusive rights to the code so they don't get screwed down the line if someone decides they don't want their code in there, but that isn't something you need a contr…
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But then, as soon as I heard that it was funded by the US government, it all kind of fell into place, so much about the odd behaviour of that project fell into place once they did. The contracts probably so they have ownership rights to the code and can relicense it as proprietary if and when they so chose, if I had to guess. But IANAL.
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@bob That's what really gets me. If you have a proper copyleft license, you're 100% protected. So the best case scenario, is they're being overly protective. More likely, frankly, I'm inclined to believe its there for less benevolent reasons.
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@bob Yeah, and we saw how the US government has been treating TOR lately, given the Applebaum fiasco that appears to be mostly engineered controversy for the sake of discrediting TOR. Though in the fullness of time, it doesn't seem to have put much of a dent in TOR usage or development.
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@bob I think it's probable that it was such a thing. They wanted weapons to use against foreign governments, not tools in the hands of their own population to resist the establishment. In fact, I think the genesis of this trend of "Russian haxor" nonsense comes from a place of the US establishment trying to find a way to explain away destroying the cyberdissident…
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@bob I honestly don't see the utility of it outside of use as a marketing tool. Talks and conferences like that.
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@verius It's there to try to grab IP rights. I read through it after making those comments and thats like 99% of it.
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@verius I make a very careful distinction here. Its not to protect them from bad submissions. Its to protect them from you trying to withdraw submissions. It also prohibits you from using your code elsewhere. That last one disrespects the Four Freedoms in a very fundamental way.
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@verius It's basically a non-compete clause, which is a pretty big thing in the proprietary world, but it doesn't belong in free software.
maiyannah
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