On Wed, Jul 28, 2021 at 5:53 PM Solomon B <solomonb9(a)outlook.com> wrote:
If you want to mix proprietary software with free software then
copyleft is not your answer. Permissive licenses such as Apache 2.0/BSD/MIT is what you
are looking for.
It might be nice to have a "mission statement" from the copyleft-next authors
regarding what is their overall goal with this license?
I find it (thought of it) as a more utilitarian form of GPL, with more focus on usability
than on doctrine...
Now about the statement regarding the mix of copyleft-next with proprietary licenses, I
think this puts copyleft-next into a lonely corner of open-source licenses... Because in
the end (like with many things today) a power of a license comes from its user-base, and
unfortunately a user-base can't be built only upon "pure" open-source
projects, mainly because there is no funding in that niche.
A note about your algorithm example; Algorithms as the ideas per se
are not protected by copyright. Meaning, even if you publish your algorithm under a
proprietary license; That doesn't stop anyone else from writing a white paper in plain
English or in mathematical notation about what the algorithm is supposed to do, then
someone else can reimplement that algorithm under any license of their choice.
I agree in principle, that ideas can't / shouldn't be licensed / patented;
however there is a distinction between a "specification" (what an algorithm is
in the end) and it's "implementation" (the software embodiment of the
idea).
Take for example one of the new cryptographic hashes (that don't yet have native CPU
support like SHA): even though the algorithm is public domain, a naive implementation
(that is easy to implement in portable C or another language) might be quite inefficient,
however someone could implement it in fine-tuned assembly to achieve quite a few orders of
magnitude better performance. Thus although the algorithm is public, the implementation
could be licensed under proprietary terms.
However, getting back to my example, the algorithm is just a placeholder for some generic
useful library that is not where the value of the product lies.
Ciprian.