Le mardi 21 mai 2013 à 11:39 -0400, Theodore Ts'o a écrit :
Althought I don't always agree with all of Rob Landley's
positions, I
think he had a very interesting take copyleft compatibility issues,
and it makes a very interesting counterpoint to the "the state of
copyleft is fine" talks that I've been listening to lately.
In particular I was taken by Rob's comment:
But there's no "the GPL" anymore. Linux and Samba can't share code,
even though they implement two ends of the same protocol. And
making your project "GPLv2 or later" means you can't take code from
_either_ source.
Since many people don't have the time (or patience) to wade through
the admittedly rather low signal-to-noise ratio of LKML, and I think
folks on this list might find it interesting, I thought I'd take the
liberty of forwarding it here.
So the question with respect to copyleft-next is whether the diagnosis
that the reason for the decline in copyleft's popuarity is because the
license is too complicated, or for the reasons which Rob has
articulated. If the answer is a little of both, is there anything we
can do to make sure that copyleft-next doesn't make the problem of
splitting the copyleft community worse? (i.e., by introducing a new
license which is both GPLv2 and GPLv3 incompatible)
IMHO, copyleft-next should be forward-compatible, not only with GPLv2
and GPLv3, but also LGPL and perhaps MPL.
This implies to have a "weak" copyleft model, and I think that's the way
to go, as noted in the previous discussion, given the increasing
importance of libraries and dynamic languages in free software
ecosystems.
Regards
Antoine.