I don’t care if it’s better or worse. Mysterious undocumented technology running as PID #1 represents a huge security threat. It is useless and even dangerous until it is documented well enough so that ‘man init’ or ‘man upstart’ tells us what we need to know to do the things we need to do, and allows us to use it confidently without taking a “fun learning journey” through websites and tutorials and “here is an example” postings that leave us guessing just where some of those example options came from and what they do.

Clear, definitive man pages which represent the exact features and syntax supported on the version that is currently installed are essential for /sbin/init.

As for liberal licences: you can just leave those bits of code BSD/MIT, right? If you want to upgrade the license of the bulk of the canonical code to the GPL3 for instance, those few BSD/MIT bits would not interfere or get in the way, would they?

Even so, it’s not a big deal – I don’t want to imply that Canonical has sinister plans or anything like that – far from it. I’m just hoping upstart gets adopted far and wide, because I do believe it’s the most interesting design of all the init replacements. Wide adoption can only help with the upstart tasks etc.

On a side note: do you have any idea what’s happening with upstart in Debian?

Basically, anything outside the mainlines of F/OSS is a distruption: New, minority share F/OSS Licenses, EULAS and copyright assignments. We build a Free Software society where one of the pillars is the GPL. Anything outside of this is something new, a “disruption” using my own words.

The Canonical copyright assignment means:
the developer has to read and understand a new legal document
the developer has to take a stance and trust a new entity (Canonical)
the developer has to wonder why going with the mainline (plain model GPL) is not enough.

I want all software simply to be free, without having to have a lot of lawyers involved. (I notice we all had to go through all of the steps above once already for established parties like GPL and GNU; but this is as noted above now the pillar of the F/OSS community)

This is obnoxious, but not as obnoxious as the Mozilla Firefox EULA thing.

I don’t see why this is needed though since earlier paragraphs already state that the contributor must hand over the Copyright to his/her contributions. Which effectively means Canonical can do whatever it wants with the code.

In fact, it’s a bit strange.

1. Hand over copyright so we can do whatever we want.
2. We promise to only do this though.
3. But we reserve the right to do whatever we want.

Anyway, that’s how I read it.

(And no, don’t think it’s Canonical’s intention to be evil. I can understand assigning copyright to ease a license transition. And I don’t think that Upstart is particularly large or complex (it’s no OpenOffice and not that many companies is involved etc that it matters much. But personally, I would never hand over copyright to any large contribution if I don’t completely trust the entity I hand it over to… Especially if I’m another company. It shifts the balance inherent in the GPL. See e.g. the Sun/Novell OpenOffice brouhaha.)

There’s no real unnecessary paperwork to signing a document with a GPG key

@Martin: my understanding is that it’s a “may also” on the back of a “will” – so Canonical always has to release as open source, even if it does anything else as well (e.g. if a partner asks us to licence with additional terms).

The patch contains the GPLed code as context so it can’t be licensed under anything else than the original license.