On Tue, Jan 15, 2013 at 10:01 AM, Richard Fontana <fontana@sharpeleven.org> wrote:
> On 01/15/2013 11:02 AM, Luis Villa wrote:
>> Will the talk explain the purpose of c-l? :)
>
> Yes (though one response to the "What is the purpose" question is "why
> does there have to be a purpose?").

I would say that it must have a purpose, because the cost of introducing a new license is high; in particular, by creating more choices for everyone, it means all participants in our ecosystem must learn something new and face additional complexity every time they make a licensing decision.

This isn't to say that there should never be new licenses, just that authors owe it to the broader community to consider these costs, and ask the community to incur the costs only when there is a describable, positive benefit to be gained. (AGPL and GPL v3, for example, would clear this bar- they obviously addressed new, important issues. MPL 2 is a closer case, though in its favor, the clearly-defined upgrade mechanism and explicit deprecation by the license author mitigate some of the cost by replacing an existing, older license.)

Sadly, I think this burden is higher for Serious Authors like you, Richard, because your license is less likely to be ignored and therefore more likely to impose costs on everyone.

>> It has been a very
>> interesting and educational drafting exercise, so I'm glad to have
>> participated here and will continue to do so,
>
> Thank you!
>
>> but I'm still unclear on
>> what the long-term goal is. (Or perhaps to frame the question
>> differently: what practical role in the licensing ecosystem does it
>> fill that other licenses do not?)
>
> A fair question or set of questions, which I haven't addressed too
> explicitly I suppose.
>
> In a couple of talks I gave in 2012, I speculated that the GNU GPL
> license family might (as some have asserted is the case, citing or
> using data that admittedly has been questioned) be suffering
> competitive disadvantage relative to other licenses, principally
> popular noncopyleft licenses. I suggested that one set of reasons for
> this might be a suboptimal and unnecessary degree of general
> complexity and aesthetic baroqueness, associated particularly (other
> than as to LGPL, I suppose), though not exclusively, with the v3
> license set.

I think this is true (for both v2 and 3). To what extent the complexity/baroqueness is the driver is less clear. It is definitely a factor, but as you say, it is one of many issues.

> If this is true, and I don't know whether it is, I assert
> that it implies that the degree of strong copyleft licensing,
> particularly for newer free software projects, is lower than it
> *ought* to be, as there are no viable alternatives to the GNU GPL
> family for developers otherwise potentially favorable towards strong
> copyleft policy.

> As a related point, I believe there is some continued commercial
> resistance to the GNU GPL license family (more so the v3 licenses than
> GPLv2, no doubt) and I believe this has some effect on upstream
> license use by projects that are not commercial as such, which goes
> beyond what one would expect if the only characteristic distinguishing
> copyleft from non-copyleft licenses were the minimum differential
> legal language necessary to implement the different legal policies of
> such licenses. I have encountered anecdotal evidence suggesting this
> is so.

Could you elaborate a bit on this? My sense is that the primary objection for commercial users of the license has to do with the nature of the copyleft rather than the specific language that implements the copyleft, so for *commercial* adoption I think the drafting question is definitely only marginal in effect. [Not to say a rewrite wouldn't help commercial adoption, but that it is far from the primary issue.]

<snip>

> As a further related point, I have come to realize that the GNU GPL
> license family is subjected to stricter scrutiny than other
> widely-used FLOSS licenses, more for historical, social and political
> reasons than because of the objective merit of such licenses. To put
> it more simply, the GNU GPL license family carries a lot of 'baggage'
> and in some respects you could say the GNU GPL license family has been
> the victim of its own great success. It is possible that the only
> long-term way out of that is to start over from scratch and in a
> manner partially or wholly external to the FSF, which is essentially
> what copyleft-next has done (although the 'starting over from scratch'
> was not foreseeable at the outset).

> So if you imagine either (a) copyleft-next being used by actual
> software projects, or (b) copyleft-next at least influencing future
> license drafting efforts by others (especially on the copyleft side,
> and above all on the GNU license family side), a speculative goal is
> that a structurally and aesthetically different license with
> approximately the same policy objective as GPLv2 will help correct
> what I believe may be a kind of market error, which is essentially
> this: that non-substantive characteristics of the GNU GPL are
> frustrating the policy objectives of the GNU GPL by having some
> inhibitive effect on license adoption and use.

> That's one long-winded partial answer to the "goal" question. There
> are other goals, and other goals may yet emerge. At least one goal is
> personal (my personal feeling, which I can't shake, that GPLv3 is
> "unfinished", which I do not expect anyone else in the world to
> share).

I certainly sympathize :)

> As I indicated above, though, I am not sure there has to be a
> goal in the sense you may mean. There are a few things that
> copyleft-next does that the GNU GPL licenses do not do (particularly
> the disincentives it creates for copyleft abuse by dual-licensing
> vendors and the like), and many things the GNU GPL (especially GPLv3)
> attempts to do that copyleft-next, at least in current form,
> deliberately does not try to do.
>
> It doesn't quite answer your different question about "practical
> role", though I guess it implies an answer.

It does. At least, it gives me a rationale I could explain to others as to both why the license exists and why they might want to use it, and which I can use to help guide my contributions. Which is a big step. (I am not sure the goal is attainable but at least I grok it now.)

> I suppose I should add something, which is that I have encountered
> from a few people the sense that there is something per se improper
> about copyleft-next because (as far as I can tell, this is the
> sentiment), if taken seriously, it is an effort to "change the way
> things are". This is a disturbingly conservative or reactionary view
> and if copyleft-next can do anything, however small, to challenge this
> sentiment I think it is worthwhile for that reason alone.

For what it is worth, I do not subscribe to that sentiment.

Luis