On 2013-02-14 12:24, Francois Marier wrote:
On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 4:40 PM, Richard Fontana
<fontana(a)sharpeleven.org> wrote:
> Does anyone think the idea of a limited-term copyleft -- particularly
> given that copyleft-next is a software-oriented license -- is a
> good/bad idea?
I really like the idea. It's an elegant hack on the ever-increasing
copyright term. It would also put a bound on the amount of work
involved in relicensing old pieces of code with lots of unreachable
contributors.
Exactly. It is an upper bound on the consequences of a mistaken
licensing choice. Unless of course that licensing choice were a
permissive license. :-)
> If anyone thinks it's a good idea, what would be a good
copyleft
> duration? 15, 20, 25 years?
Are there examples of 20 year-old copyleft code that would be useful
today as it was published 20 years ago? In other words, in 5 years,
could someone fork the 1998 Linux kernel and do something that would
threaten the GPL project in any way?
I find it unlikely that the 2003 Linux Kernel would be a threat to the
mainline. Useful, yes. Possibly even commercially viable. But not for
the same uses as the mainline.
OTOH, people are still running Windows XP, which is around 10 years old.
OTOOH, the version people are actually using is SP4, which is just under
5 years old.
--
/c