Disinformation Disinfected, Pt. 1

One of the things that bothers me about Novell is there are a few very vocal people pumping out a lot of disinformation. Some of it I have touched on in passing, but I might just try my hand at pointing out one point at a time in a series of posts. Fear my blogging!

Most of the disinformation is in the areas of mono and Moonlight (no surprise there), but I’ll start with what I consider a clear cut case of hypocrisy from another controversial Novell project…

Copyright assignment

Say you came across a project – call it go-oo -  a fork of a “concentrated set of patches” for another project – call that one OpenOffice.Org.

Say that the go-oo home page made a big deal about how it was “freer” than OpenOffice.Org, and offered up something like:

Freer licensing

We believe that copyright assignment to a single corporate entity opens the door for substantial abuse of the best-interests of the codebase and developer community.

Say that the company behind go-oo was Novell (not much promoted on the website) had another project – call it mono – which in a FAQ about licensing had something like:

Why does Novell require a copyright assignment?

When a developer contributes code to the C# compiler or the Mono runtime engine, we require that the author grants Novell the right to relicense his/her contribution under other licensing terms.

Or say, Novell had a blanket “Novell Copyright Assignment for Open Source Projects“, and required this for other major Open Source projects.

Now if there were a vocal supporter[1] of go-oo, who often ranted about how poorly Sun managed OpenOffice.Org, especially focusing on the point of copyright assignment being a problem – would it be unfair to call that person a hypocrite? Or perhaps just ignorant? Surely not  simply malicious in distorting the truth?

The fact of the matter is most major open source projects require copyright assignment. This isn’t something limited to OpenOffice.Org or to mono. It’s just a standard way of doing business because of how copyright law works.

In conclusion

I just want to start here with what I see as a clear case of dual-standards, “it’s wrong when they do it, but it’s OK when we do it” example, because I think you will see this sort of disinformation appear again and again.

I also wanted to start off with this specific point, because some mono apologists like to squeak out the lie that mono doesn’t require copyright assignment like silent fart in church and hope no one notices:

Mono is a true community project. Novell doesn’t even require copyright assignment for the code you contribute, the only rules that exist for contributing involve having looked at the source code for Microsoft’ .NET implementation.

Oh my … someone noticed.

[1] Here is a long thread in which that “vocal supporter” presents his full arguments(?) Be forewarned: long, tedious, and sorted in reverse order, but it is there if you care to read “both sides” of the debate and judge for yourself.