On Mon, Feb 18, 2013 at 01:21:16PM -0500, Pamela Chestek wrote:
If anyone (non-lawyer or otherwise) thinks it would be bad *policy* to live in a world where a GPL-like license could be enforced through the legal system by the obvious immediate beneficiaries of the source code requirement, feel free to speak up (in a HBR-compliant manner of course).
This is, in theory, a significant poison pill to the use of the agreement, so it's a policy decision.
I am aware of this, but I wonder whether there are compensatory aspects of copyleft-next (or more could be added) to nullify the increase in poison. Already, let us say up till this change, I consider copyleft-next to have the appearance of greater commercial palatability than GPLv2/GPLv3 (this is kind of obvious for GPLv3 since the anti-lockdown provisions were deleted as were most of the patent-related provisions). That's not a major goal, but it's a minor goal which I acknowledged at FOSDEM.
As a related aside, whether commercial vendor (or user, especially in the case of AGPL-like licenses) sentiment towards FLOSS licenses has any material impact in their uptake is an unanswered question. A key assumption made by the FSF in the way it handled its quasi-public drafting process for GPLv3 (2006-2007) was that in some way this was so (even though the official view of the FSF remains that 'popularity' of their licenses is a non-goal). I see no post-2007 evidence to justify this view one way or another. I could elaborate on that though it might get a bit off-topic.
That said, I suspect that anyone who isn't sophisticated about copyleft (which is most everyone) believes that this is already a feature of the GPL licenses. In other words, the great fear of GPL is that it will "infect" your proprietary code and you will be forced to release the source code. (Correct me if I've misunderstood; I think this provision will have that effect.)
It is not intended to have that effect, because the license in general is not intended to have that effect. (If anything I would like to somehow make copyleft-next strong copyleft while making clearer that this does not somehow equate to mass 'infection' of a larger proprietary code base, though I am not quite sure how to do this.) It is, however, intended to increase the (perceived) likelihood of enforcement.
I am not sure if you know the FSF party line since approximately the late 1990s, which has been quite influential (among developer communities at least). It is that the GPL, at least, is "not a contract" (this was even the initial title of GPLv3's acceptance clause!) and only supports enforcement through an action for copyright infringement by the copyright holder. Without getting into the substance of this I note that it has shaped the nature of GPL compliance activity at least on the community-upstream-licensor and consumer-type end-user sides.
So I'm not sure that adding the actual mechanism for it to work will make the license less palatable to a commercial user of copylefted code than the GPL already is, although it should.
Right, that makes sense. In a certain sense, you could say that adding this mechanism to, say, GPLv2 would have made anti-GPL paranoia among some corporate lawyers (or, say, opportunistic encouragement of paranoia on the part of *some* outside counsel during the frothier years of the 2000s) slightly more rational.
- RF