Open Letter: Adopt RMS' CAA/CLA Suggested Texts

Wednesday 20 October 2010 by Bradley M. Kuhn

I was glad to read today that Sam Varghese is reporting that Mark Shuttleworth doesn't want Canonical, Ltd. to engage in business models that abuse proprietary relicensing powers in a negative way. I wrote below a brief open letter to Mark for him to read when he returns from UDS (since the article said he would handle this in detail upon his return from there). It's fortunate that there is a simple test to see if Mark's words are a genuine commitment for change by Canonical, Ltd. There's a simple action he can take to show if means to follow through on his statement:

Dear Mark,

I was glad to read today that you have no plans to abuse the powers of proprietary relicensing that Canonical, Ltd's. CAAs/CLAs give you. As you are hopefully already aware, Richard Stallman published a few suggested texts to use if you are attempting to only consider benign business models as part of your CAA/CLA process. Since you've committed to that, I would expect you'd be ready, willing and able to adopt those immediately for Canonical, Ltd.'s, CLAs and CAAs. When will you do so?

Thanks very much for taking my criticisms seriously and I look forward to seeing this change soon in Canonical, Ltd.'s CAAs and/or CLAs.

Posted on Wednesday 20 October 2010 at 12:15 by Bradley M. Kuhn.

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