On Wed, Aug 1, 2012 at 3:07 PM, Bradley M. Kuhn bkuhn@ebb.org wrote:
Richard Fontana wrote at 22:12 (EDT) on Tuesday:
No, because common weak copyleft licenses aren't structured as "strong copyleft plus additional permissions". The one exception is LGPLv3, of course.
But policy-wise, that's what they are, even if they aren't structured that way.
In the world of platonic license forms, the structure doesn't matter. But in the world of actually reading and interpreting licenses, structure matters.
With no offense to our host, I find reading/interpreting LGPL v3 maddening for exactly this structural reason, and I am pretty sure I'm in the majority in this area. And I actually like GPL v3; for those who are for predisposed not to like v3 for any of the various reasons available, LGPL v3's structure is only insult to injury.
Anyway, Free Software licenses are about public policy and philosophy. The rest is, ultimately, just details.
Adoption is intimately linked to achievement of any public policy goals, and ease of comprehension (encompassing not just policy but also drafting and structure) is intimately linked to adoption.
Luis