On 08/26/2012 10:38 AM, Ben Cotton wrote:
On Sun, Aug 26, 2012 at 9:40 AM, Richard Fontana
<fontana(a)sharpeleven.org> wrote
> (however, copyleft-next today
> cannot reasonably be considered a derivative work of the GNU GPL).
Now that's an interesting philosophical point. I'll agree that the
current draft of copyleft-next bears little resemblance to the GPL,
but given that it started with the GPL text, is it not eternally a
derivative work?
It's a derivative work in a non-legal factual sense, since you can
easily go through the commit history to trace the text's origins back
to GPLv3. But I contend that it is no longer a derivative work in the
copyright sense. Or, to put it another way, maybe even now there's
some copyright-maximalist argument that the draft of copyleft-next is
a derivative work of one or more members of the GNU GPL license
family, but it would be unthinkable for the FSF to make such an
argument. Worth noting is that copyleft-next is now no more textually
similar to any GNU license than any number of other non-GNU licenses
that show some textual influences of the GNU GPL -- see, e.g., the
termination provisions of MPL 2.0.
- Richard