Project Harmony Considered Harmful

Much advertising is designed to convince us to buy or use of something that we don't need. When I hear someone droning on about some new, wonderful thing, I have to worry that these folks are actually trying to market something to me.

Very soon, you're likely to see a marketing blitz for this thing called Project Harmony (which just released its 1.0 version of document templates). Even the name itself is marketing: it's not actually descriptive, but is so named to market a “good feeling” about the project before even knowing what it is. (It's also got serious namespace collision, including with a project already in the software freedom community.

Project Harmony markets itself as fixing something that our community doesn't really consider broken. Project Harmony is a set of document templates, primarily promulgated and mostly drafted by corporate lawyers, that entice developers to give control of their software work over to companies.

My analysis below is primarily about how these agreements are problematic for individual developers. An analysis of the agreements in light of companies or organizations using them between each other may have the same or different conclusions; I just haven't done that analysis in detail so I don't know what the outcome is.

[ BTW, I'm aware that I've failed to provide a TL;DR version of this article. I tried twice to write one and ultimately decided that I can't. Simply put, these issues are complex, and I had to draw on a decade of software freedom licensing, policy, and organizational knowledge to fully articulate what's wrong with the Project Harmony agreements. I realize that sounds like a It was hard to write — it should be hard to read justification, but I just don't know how to summarize these Gordian problems in a pithy way. I nevertheless hope developers will take the time to read this before they sign a Project Harmony agreement, or — indeed — any CLA or ©AA. ]

Copyright Assignment That Lacks Real Assurances

First of all, about half of Project Harmony is copyright assignment agreements ( ©AAs). Assigning copyright completely gives the work over to someone else. Once the ©AA is signed, the work ceases to belong to the assignor. It's as if that work was done by the assignee. There is admittedly some value to copyright assignment, particularly if developers want to ensure that the GPL or other copyleft is enforced on their work and they don't have time to do it themselves. (Although developers can also designate an enforcement agent to do that on their behalf even if they don't assign copyright, so even that necessity is limited.)

One must immensely trust an assignee organization. Personally, I've only ever assigned some of my copyrights to one organization in my life: the Free Software Foundation, because FSF is the only organization I ever encountered that is institutionally committed to DTRT'ing with copyrights in a manner similar to my personal moral beliefs.

First of all, as I've written about before, FSF's ©AA make all sorts of promises back to the assignor. Second, FSF is institutionally committed to the GPL and enforcing GPL in a way that advances FSF's non-profit advocacy mission for software freedom. All of this activity fits my moral principles, so I've been willing to sign FSF's ©AAs.

Yet, I've nevertheless met many developers who refuse to sign FSF's ©AAs. While many of such developers like the GPL, they don't necessarily agree with the FSF's moral positions. Indeed, in many cases, developers are completely opposed to assigning copyright to anyone, FSF or otherwise. For example, Linus Torvalds, founder of Linux, has often stated on record that he never wanted to do copyright assignments, for several reasons: [he] think[s] they are nasty and wrong personally, and [he]'d hate al