"(Edit to add: a friend in the contracting industry points out that it also prevents vendors who won't ship GPLv3 from using external contractors to work on Mir - they have to go to Canonical, because only Canonical can relicense contributions under a proprietary license.)"
Works for hire aren't considered distribution (in my experience), so a vendor could hire a contractor to write code for Mir. But if the vendor did not want to distribute that code under the GPLv3, then would have to get a different license for Mir from Canonical before they could incorporate the contractor-written code and distribute the result. This doesn't change much though, if they didn't want to distribute under the GPLv3 they would have to get a separate license from Canonical anyway, whether they modified Mir or not.
Power management, mobile and firmware developer on Linux. Security developer at Aurora. Ex-biologist. mjg59 on Twitter. Content here should not be interpreted as the opinion of my employer. Also on Mastodon.
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Date: 2013-06-20 01:19 am (UTC)Works for hire aren't considered distribution (in my experience), so a vendor could hire a contractor to write code for Mir. But if the vendor did not want to distribute that code under the GPLv3, then would have to get a different license for Mir from Canonical before they could incorporate the contractor-written code and distribute the result. This doesn't change much though, if they didn't want to distribute under the GPLv3 they would have to get a separate license from Canonical anyway, whether they modified Mir or not.