Harmony Project Pushes Lawyers Off FOSS's Back

Julie188 writes "Harmony is an effort that was begun and shepherded by Amanda Brock, the general counsel at Canonical. The intent was to create a small collection of consistently-worded contribution agreements (both licenses and assignments) for free and open source projects to use to reduce the friction such agreements can cause when they're encountered for the first time by corporate counsel unfamiliar with FOSS licensing. Version 1.0 of the documents have launched. As court cases involving software copyrights and patents continue to sprout forth, we don't have the liberty of ignoring the changes brought on by the law. Neither do we get to follow Dick the Butcher's suggestion in Henry the Sixth, and kill all the lawyers."

Re:Contribution for what return?

[Bruce Perens]

Even corporations should be concerned about the prospect of their work being taken private - the project being removed from Open Source and made commercial-only - shortly after their contribution. After all, corporations have to account to their stockholders, and a contribution that can go private quickly would indicate a lack of due diligence or poor negotiation, that could potentially result in lost money, time, and resources.