Licensing
If you intend to have your port merged into the main Mono distribution, keep in mind that you must grant Novell permission to redistribute your work under other licenses other than the LGPL. This means that you must be the owner of any code contributed to Novell and that you are in a position to sign such an agreement.
“you must grant Novell permission to redistribute your work under other licenses other than the LGPL.”
So legally, Novell could relicence Mono under a closed source licence and sell it off? That just doesn’t cut it.
i386: No, it means that as well as releasing it under the LGPL, they also want the right to sell commercial versions of it, or to develop a ‘mono advanced’ version derived from it.
It’s not an uncommon sort of clause for combined commercial projects, (Evolution - even before it was Novell, Openoffice, flumotion, others), and leaves them in a legally clear position with respect to community contributions.
In the unlikely event that Novell do in the future decide to stop open source development on the code, they _do_ get to keep the code you’ve granted them, but then so do you because it was released under the LGPL and you’re free at any time to start a completely LGPL fork of the project.
They can get away with it because everyone is too lazy to fork the project. If people did this as soon as companies like this put these kinds of requirements on contributors they would quickly find that everyone is contributing to the “no copyright assignment necessary” fork and evil-mega-corp would either have to contribute to that project or fall behind in terms of relevancy.
It is because they are a proprietary software company scrambling to be relevant to the world. They have a half assed strategy and no idea how to sit between open source and proprietary without mixing their messages and obviously the way they should be doing business versus how they used to do business