On Tue, Jul 31, 2012 at 8:25 PM, Theodore Ts'o tytso@mit.edu wrote:
On Tue, Jul 31, 2012 at 10:40:41PM -0400, Richard Fontana wrote:
It is intended to be strong copyleft. This is a fixed goal.
Just to clarify, when you say strong copyleft, you mean in the GPL vs LGPL sense, right?
People have been using "stronger" and "weaker" in other senses (i.e., whether there are more restrictions, such as the anti-Tivo clause) --- i.e., GPLv3 is "stronger" than GPLv2, or GPLv2 is "stronger" than BSD.
Personally, I don't really like "strong" and "weak" because it's rather imprecise, and it doesn't take into account the multidemensional nature of things; that is, it's not a single continuum of where certain licenses are "stronger" than others, and where someone might try to say that the "strongest" copyleft is best; licenses can't be strictly ordered!
Historically, that has been the case, but given the convergence in patent termination clauses, notification requirements, and compatibility, the most recent versions of the major licenses (Apache, MPL 2, LGPL 3, GPL 3, AGPL 3, but excluding eclipse) actually can be basically strictly ordered on a copyleft-only basis.
Luis