[guardian-dev] jitsi's parent company BlueJimp becoming part of Atlassian

[Lee Azzarello]

Heya,

I just picked up on this thread now, two months too late but I would
like to chime in about my support of ostel.co. I continue to support
the public service, which has 41K registered users and is going
strong. As you may know, end user support is weak due to the project
being a low priority for both GP and Series Digital, though the user
base is active.

I've done a number of private deployments of the ostel stack. It's
become a pretty standard procedure. My base rate is $3000 and it takes
about two days. That said I haven't done any development on the
backend stack in over a year. The primary reason is that the client
application landscape, while abundant is a mess. Client support is
also the more frequently asked question and it the most important area
for user interest. Jitsi continues to be the most fully featured
client as well as the most frequent request for user support. We at
Series Digital have discussed developing Jitsi to have a more
contemporary user experience, but the complexity of the code base as
well as a growing desire for WebRTC support has pushed that project
down on the priority list.

So to me this acquisition by a well know enterprise software company
is a good sign for improved client support. Unfortunately it's a bad
sign for freedom. I'm committed to supporting the backend stack as the
world's only fully open source end-to-end secure SIP system. I'm
interested to see where Atlassian takes the development of the WebRTC
front end, especially regarding encryption.

That's my two sense. It seems the CLA is a very bad sign for freedom
and I agree with Hans that moving away from otr4j in GP applications
would be a good move.

Regards,
Lee



On Sun, Apr 26, 2015 at 12:19 PM, Hans-Christoph Steiner
<hans at guardianproject.info> wrote:
>
>
> Tom Ritter:
>> On 22 April 2015 at 08:41, Hans-Christoph Steiner
>> <hans at guardianproject.info> wrote:
>>>
>>> This is sounding not so promising for the future of jitsi as free software.
>>> Atlassian seems to have no free software projects of their own whatsoever, and
>>> there page about "open source" is basically a sales pitch:
>>>
>>> https://www.atlassian.com/opensource
>>>
>>> more here, it looks like this is probably the Atlassian press release, more or
>>> less:
>>> http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/21/atlassian-acquires-open-source-video-conferencing-company-bluejimp-to-power-hipchats-video-chat/
>>>
>>
>> If they're going to use Jitsi's (open) source code in their closed
>> source environment, and build on it without releasing the
>> contributions (which is possible as they can relicense any additional
>> developments to it) - it makes me wonder if past contributors to Jitsi
>> can assert copyright over their contributions.  (I assume Jitsi wasn't
>> requiring contributor agreements like some projects do to clear
>> similar hurdles.)  I don't know much about this part of open source
>> licensing though.
>>
>> -tom
>
> BlueJimp has required a CLA for contributions to their jitsi repositories:
> http://bluejimp.com/bca.pdf
>
> With this clause:
>
> "you hereby assign to us joint ownership, and to the extent that such
> assignment is or becomes invalid, ineffective or unenforceable, you hereby
> grant to us a perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, worldwide, no-charge,
> royalty-free, unrestricted license to exercise all rights under those
> copyrights. This includes, at our option, the right to sublicense these same
> rights to third parties through multiple levels of sublicensees or other
> licensing arrangements; "
>
> Which seems to me to say that they can relicense any of the jitsi source code
> as they please.  That's part of my objection to having otr4j governed by their
> CLA:
>
> https://github.com/jitsi/otr4j/issues/15
>
> .hc
>
>
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