Present: Ted, James, Jon, Alan, Thomas, Greg, Amanda, Chris
1. Project Harmony (Canonical's Copyright Assignment Harmonisation
push): Report back from Ted on 16 June Meeting. Did anyone go
to the 23 June meeting in London? Amanda has given them a BoF
at LinuxCon at 17:00 on 11 August, so we probably need someone
to go to that. [Ted, James]
<because of Chatham House Rules of Project Harmony, only what was said
will be recorded in the minutes, not who said them>
One strong mantra which more than one participant has emphasized is
“first do no harm”. So the people at the Boston meeting agreed that
Project Harmony should not make any statement impugning things like (a)
the implicit patent license of GPLv2 and/or (b) projects which use
implicit licensing schemes (ala the Linux Kernel's Signed-off-by:
scheme).
It was generally understood by the participants that different projects
will have different opinions and commercial requirements about what will
be necessary. So the intent of Project Harmony will be to draft a
“modular” copyright assignment (although obviously there will be side
effects and interaction between various copyright assignment choices;
that will be one of the challenges for the lawyers to deal with).
Alan Cox didn't have time to attend the London Project Harmony meeting.
Discussion about Canonical's position on wanting a privileged position
of being able to commercialize open source projects but not allowing
anyone else to do so. Would it be helpful to write a private letter to
Mark discussion the downsides of such an unfair “bargain”, in terms of
community participation in a Canonical sponsored open source project.
There was general disbelief that Mark would be willing to listen, but it
was doubtful such a letter could do any arm. James agreed to drive the
such a letter to Mark.
2. OFCOM/BBC. As predicted, they instituted copy protection
anyway. Is there anything further we need to do, or is that it?
Some EU folks have been offended about what BBC tried to do. Alan will
keep an eye on it for further developments, but for now we don't need to
do anything.
3. Tejun is trying to get disk manufacturers to pay attention to
SATA/ATA disk problems. He's detailed the issues here:
https://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Known_issues (the main one
being frequent head unloads). We're trying to broker meetings
with Samsung, Seagate, Western Digital and Hitachi … can the
LF or the TAB help? [James]
James will suggest to Tejun that we approach these manufacturers under
aegis of the LF TAB (some of the manufacturers may respond more
constructively because of the invocation of the Linux Founation name –
especially those who might come from a Japanese cultural background,
where your organization that you come from can have a large impact on
how you are received). Also, the LF can manage the non-disclosure
agreement umbrella if that becomes necessary because of the sensitivity
to the manufacters' business.
4. Any other business
None.
Meeting adjourned at 12:39 PM US/Eastern