Shuttleworth admits his side of things has been poorly explained and that he needs to try and communicate better on this front.He made the admission during his keynote to the Ubuntu Developers' Summit which is taking place in Budapest this week.The experienced media operator that he is, Shuttleworth ensured that nobody would refer to this aspect of his speech by throwing out a figure of 200 million as being the number of users he aims for in four years - growth of nearly 1700 per cent, given that Ubuntu now has around 12 million users.That number has been spouted over and over again in the tech media and his statements on copyright assignment have been totally ignored. Which I think is what he intended - copyright assignment is a ticklish issue from which he has shied away.In December 2010 and again in January this year, I wrote to him, asking the same question: "If you're not planning to take your company's software proprietary, why are you insisting on contribution terms which explicitly give you the right to take the software proprietary?"There was no reply. But now Shuttleworth has apparently decided that he needs to talk about the policy, albeit in his own rather roundabout way.

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"One of the really difficult questions that has come up again and again has been the question of contribution agreements, copyright assignment," Shuttleworth said, while talking about the role that companies have played in the project. "In the way I've handled this (discussion over copyright assignment policy) I think I've failed as a leader and that is going to change today."I have very strong views, I think principled views, on what it will take to build a collaborative ecosystem between communities and companies. One of those things is that we're going to have to learn as community members - and this goes for me when I'm talking about other projects - we're going to have to learn to respect the needs of people who are subject to different constraints and have different requirements to us."One of our key values is collaboration but I think in the open source community we misunderstand collaboration. We think that two people getting together who have exactly the same values, the same interests, the same way of working, the same goals, we think that is collaboration. It's not; it's teamwork."Real collaboration is when you bring together people who have different goals, different constraints, differences, and they find a way to work together. That's not something that's celebrated often enough in open source in my view."What we have is, people say you should be collaborating, but you should change this, change that, change the next thing in order to collaborate. I don't think so."I think collaboration is a conversation around the code and how we can work together to get a great result in the code and make that available as free software."When we start saying, before we talk about that we're going to set a whole bunch of ideological constraints down, we're actual putting barriers in the way of collaboration."

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"The reason I think I've failed in this is because the views that I hold are based on a vision of free software as the de facto standard way that industry does software. I don't think however it is going to the only way that industry does software."I think we need to figure out how to get companies into the free software ecosystem in a way where their contribution is actually valued and respected. I think we also need to go beyond the stage we're in today where the only companies that can actually participate are companies that don't focus on software."If you look at most of the contributions from companies today, they come from companies that do hardware, that have other services, and the software is a means to an end. As a result we have, in vast tracts of free software, second-class options. We need to be honest about that."We need to be honest about that fact that iOS and Android have created transformative ecosystems in the face of a monopoly from Microsoft and we haven't. In order to understand that we need to be willing to tackle some sacred cows - this (copyright assignment) is one of them."So from today, I'm going to start making a public case for why we need to rethink our community position on this. I understand that my position is the minority one, I understand that it is the difficult one. But you know most of the real changes in history that I admire and respect have been led by people who took a difficult position. So I'm willing to take that, I think it's the right one."Where I think I failed is that I said, because I have these principled views, Canonical will follow this policy and I haven't made that case strongly within Canonical and I certainly haven't made it publicly. I will start that process now."Now that he's made the admission, a good point to start, I think, would be to provide a simple answer to that question which I posed.