On Tue, Jul 27, 2021 at 10:47:55PM -0000, Solomon B wrote:
> To quote section 8 of copyleft-next-0.3.1:
> `
> 8. Copyleft Sunset
>
>    The conditions in sections 3 through 5 no longer apply once fifteen
>    years have elapsed from the date of My first Distribution of My Work
>    under this License.
> '
> I feel that addressing copyright obsolescence should be follow whatever the copyright law says - which is currently 120 years or the author's lifetime plus 70 years - because the issue I am seeing with the "Copyleft Sunset" clause is that it puts free software as a disadvantage in comparison to non-free software. As a free software maximalist I want all software in the world to never be proprietary including the old software that I wrote ages ago and nobody uses anymore, I want that too to remain free forever and after.

On this day 15 years ago I was working as a community college librarian in the Territory of American Samoa with a MacBook as my personal home computer and a desktop computer at work running Windows XP.  The Raspberry Pi and BeagleBoard classes of single board computers were not even on the market yet.  Arduino wasn't on the market yet either although you could find the BASIC Stamp at the time readily available.  Things have thankfully changed a wee bit since then.

Yes, the sunset clause disincentivizes use of this license for software that might eventually become retro-tech.  Increasingly systems are developing in so many ways that I have no idea what we will see by 2036.  Would a program written today be able to function unadapted and without changes then?

If an exception to the license is needed to account for legacy uses then that could be arranged between the author of The Work and those seeking the exception.