Canonical, GPL compliance, restrictive IP policies, derivatives.
Yesterday, both the FSF and Conservancy announced that Canonical, Ltd. changed their Intellectual property rights policy in such a way that they no longer violate the GPL as it used to.
There are a number of personal comments on the matter by people involved in the case: Bradley M. Kuhn, Matthew Garrett and Jonathan Riddell; the TL;DR is that now the situation is fine from a legal point of view, and it has been solved in a shorter time than usual (just two years! speaking of lowered expectations...), but Canonical is still applying restrictions to non-GPL code that are out of place from a Free Software respecting entity.
This made me wonder about the hordes of tiny ubuntu derivatives out there, which are probably too small to attract attention and risk consequences, but are probably not in compliance with Canonical's policies. Should they rebase themselves on Debian, giving their trust to a community who believes in Free Software instead of a company with different priorities?
Should they start contributing upstream to Debian, and turn themselves into Debian Pure Blends? YES, but this is a different and wider matter :)
There are a number of personal comments on the matter by people involved in the case: Bradley M. Kuhn, Matthew Garrett and Jonathan Riddell; the TL;DR is that now the situation is fine from a legal point of view, and it has been solved in a shorter time than usual (just two years! speaking of lowered expectations...), but Canonical is still applying restrictions to non-GPL code that are out of place from a Free Software respecting entity.
This made me wonder about the hordes of tiny ubuntu derivatives out there, which are probably too small to attract attention and risk consequences, but are probably not in compliance with Canonical's policies. Should they rebase themselves on Debian, giving their trust to a community who believes in Free Software instead of a company with different priorities?
Should they start contributing upstream to Debian, and turn themselves into Debian Pure Blends? YES, but this is a different and wider matter :)
Another interesting link on the topic: LWN article and the comments, where there are informations about Linux Mint (it had to enter an agreement to redistribute the binaries).