I just realized that a part of my brief conversation with Mike Milinkovic following my FOSDEM talk triggers HBR.
While not a substantive point, I noted to Mike my interest in submitting some version of copyleft-next for OSI approval. (Mike, who heads the Eclipse Foundation, is on the OSI board of directors.)
The substantive point, though, was this: we were talking about how the EPL (like the MPL and its relatives) allows proprietary licensing of binary versions. I told him that I had recently thought about whether this was in conflict or not with the basic notion of strong copyleft, and whether copyleft-next could or should be revised to allow more restrictive licensing of binaries (more restrictive than copyleft-next/GPL/AGPL, that is). That might sound heretical, but it is not meant to be. It relates to a historical puzzle I have thought about.
I noted that the GNU GPL was originally intended for software that would be compiled by proprietary compilers and run on proprietary operating systems. The earliest binary versions of GNU Emacs must have contained proprietary code. This of course was what led RMS to add what came to be known as the system library exception to the definition of 'complete source code'. But the system library exception does not tell us what the license of a statically-linked binary formed out of GPL-licensed code and 'system library' code is supposed to be.
I am not sure whether RMS thought about this issue. It is possible that the licensing terms governing the various operating systems and compilers in use among the early users/porters of GPL-licensed programs like GNU Emacs were such that the question was thought to be uninteresting.
- RF