Richard Fontana wrote at 20:42 (EDT) on Thursday:
So you agree with the view (which I've heard before) that the
additional permissions scheme of GPLv3 allows GPLv3 to become the
license to end all licenses?
I didn't mean it that broadly. Specifically, I believe
GPLv3+additional_permissions can express any GPL-compatible copyleft
license.
there is just a psychological difference between, say, the ISC
license
and (GPLv3 + lots of additional permissions [+ allowed additional
restrictions] to make GPLv3 equivalent to ISC).
I agree it's not worthwhile to express highly permissive licenses that
aren't copylefts as GPLv3 with additional permissions. Focusing on that
part of it is IMO a strawman argument, though. I didn't mean to argue
for that; I'm talking about copylefts.
In any case, this vision of GPLv3 as the license to end all licenses
has (in 5 years) failed.
I wouldn't be participating in copyleft-next if I thought AGPLv3 were
the perfect copyleft. I just believe it's the best copyleft we have
right now available to us. Calling GPLv3/AGPLv3 a failure is just FUD.
It's a good piece of work that could be better. You know I agree with
you that some pointless compromises were made in GPLv3, but they don't
make it a bad license by any means. AGPLv3, in fact, is IM (very
biased) O, the best copyleft license ever written yet, but I expect it
won't be the best copyleft license *ever* written in my lifetime.
The goal of simplicity/conciseness is sufficiently important to me
that it is necessary to draft the license while figuring out
philosophy and policy as I go along.
That's a reasonable position, although I think this process was used
during GPLv3 drafting somewhat too, and I think there were major bugs in
the GPLv3 process. OTOH, those bugs may be unrelated to this aspect of
GPLv3 process.
(If other people do and want to propose them, great!)
I indeed did so, this morning.
--
-- bkuhn