Clarification of open-source policy [answered]

answered 2013-12-30 15:58:56 +0200

Stskeeps
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http://twitter.com/stskee...

I can say roughly how things work at the moment - don't take this as the 100% exact way things go, or expect things from it or that the situation is permanent. There's always exceptions, but you can see by our track record and published source that we're trying to do our best.

The current situation, unless excepted by our navigation for specific cases.

It's typically okay to open source, except for these contribution types as listed below:

• Jolla artwork/trademark and/or look-and-feel (this pretty much means UI)
• 3rd party closed source software (a natural, really)
• Contributions that has been written using NDA materials from third party (don't want to taint open source projects)
• Contributions requiring copyright transfer unless OK'ed by navigation (can't give away IPR rights)

This means that the default policy is to open source unless it's covered - and we usually contribute those to Mer or Nemo Mobile projects.

In addition to that, if something has been closed source at first, it has to be treated as if it was in the list above and get specific approval. If something is really exciting, innovative or somehow problematic naturally you may want to get the opinion of the navigation. We also work with upstream-when-and-if-possible - MeeGo was upstream-first and that caused problems on it's own. So we try our best to upstream, but we can't always wait for upstream releases to move forward.

As a personal philosophy, I think that you should only open source if you can keep a component completely in the open - git repositories, commit histories, accept patches. That makes some bits problematic.

As you can see, it's a fairly balanced way of doing things - with room for improvement on a case-by-case basis.

I would also suggest to participate in this: https://together.jolla.com/question/680/co-creation-leading-to-co-development/ on how we can improve matters.