On Sun, Oct 14, 2012 at 12:22 AM, Richard Fontana
<fontana(a)sharpeleven.org> wrote:
On 10/12/2012 09:25 AM, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote:
> I believe we're going to continue to fight about the question of whether
> anti-lock-down is a primary feature of copyleft-next. However, it seems
> to me a needlessly contentious act to delete the *supplement*. If the
> supplement structure of copyleft-next exists, then the two supplements
> that must be officially recommended are the (a) network services clause
> and (b) anti-lock-down clause.
Anyone who cares strongly about the inclusion of the anti-lockdown
clause, at this stage, is someone largely content with GPLv3 (or, say,
someone who believes that GPLv2 already effectively implements
anti-lockdown). By contrast, I think there are some who are supportive
or potentially supportive of the policy behind the network services
clause who are *not* entirely content with AGPLv3. That's my
intuition, at any rate; I may be wrong about both statements.
<mode philosophy>
I've been giving software freedoms a lot of thought over the last few
months and while at first I could not understand why claims of new
discovered freedoms (device re-OSing, network services) should be
inherently associated with older software under the older copyleft
licenses which did not make mention to these freedoms, I've now come
to grips with this as on ongoing philosophical journey and position
one can have. The founders of GNU and the original copyleft license
did have the intent all along to protect one's software freedoms, the
extent to which that could be done could only be expressed in terms of
what outlets we had at that time in terms of respecting these
freedoms. Technically though new freedoms and rights have been
described more tangibly over time and while the original authors of
GNU and copyleft have always wish to ensure such new freedoms and
rights are respected retroactively as they are discovered one cannot
assume everyone else will want to follow, although they should. The
inception of certain business models with at least a well understood
set of freedoms and rights thrived way before new freedoms were found.
These business models need their own set of licenses to also be
updated over time to remain effective and relevant to any new changes.
I see a lot of effort on the GPLv3 campaign and then AGPL to include a
lot of these new found freedoms but I consider it a mistake to discard
any older copyleft licenses as stale due to the fact that they do not
include new found freedoms. The GNU position to jump on the latest
copyleft licenses and make them apply to a lot of older projects is
fine given the spirit of the project but the tensions we have seen
over time is assumptions that everyone should do the same.
As I see it copyleft-next should evolve slowly and consider branching
out every time a new found set of freedoms are found and each branch
can move forward with updates / corrections / language taken from the
tip so long as it does not add new freedoms (kind of how we require
sha1sums from tip prior to applying a relevant patch back to stable
releases of the kernel). The tip however can and should always stay
focused on the latest freedoms.
Unfortunately though as we have it today GPLv2 was left abandoned
after GPLv3 came out. I believe a lot of language from GPLv3 could be
put into GPLv2 and I see no reason why we never did that. Short
cutting and taking copyleft-next way ahead of where GPLv2 left off
IMHO would do disservice to the community. I'm not saying it should
not happen, just saying perhaps it should not happen until we have a
nice update upgrade path from GPLv2 to a respective copyleft-next that
allows all users of GPLv2 and businesses using it to move forward with
it without any concerns or issues. Moving forward with another
iteration of copyleft-next should IMHO be reviewed carefully with all
newly discovered freedoms well described, and even business
implications taken into consideration given that we have huge
stakeholders now using these licenses.
</mode philosophy>
Luis