For anyone who'll be at FOSDEM, I am slated to give a talk on copyleft-next in the Legal Issues DevRoom (aka Legal and Policy Issues DevRoom) on Sunday (3 February).
I've continued to think about releasing an official version of copyleft-next (most likely numbered 0.1.0) and might do so around the time of FOSDEM.
- RF
On 01/12/2013 10:44 PM, Richard Fontana wrote:
For anyone who'll be at FOSDEM, I am slated to give a talk on copyleft-next in the Legal Issues DevRoom (aka Legal and Policy Issues DevRoom) on Sunday (3 February).
I've continued to think about releasing an official version of copyleft-next (most likely numbered 0.1.0) and might do so around the time of FOSDEM.
- RF
copyleft-next mailing list copyleft-next@lists.fedorahosted.org https://lists.fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/copyleft-next
Fontana,
While I wish I could join everybody in Belgium I am tied down firmly in Ashtabula County for the time being. In contrast to Bradley's remarks about Open Source Politicians, I'm currently having to be an old-fashioned politician and have a nominating petition I have to continue getting signatures secured on so I can be on the ballot in November. I need 18 more signatures from voters in the relevant electorate to run for one of the two seats up on the township's governing Board of Trustees. Though my US passport is in good working order, I don't have the funds to travel to FOSDEM but do hope there will be audio and/or video for later download.
As to making a release...what spurred this line of thought? Why then? Are there particular reporters going to be at the conference? Will you have small "press kits" containing at least a press release and a backgrounder in them that can be distributed so even non-specialist reporters can carry out "press release journalism" by just re-writing the press release?
If there is going to be an initial release we need to make sure it is a good unveiling. There needs to be a splash. Since the currently fabulous domestic job market leaves me with time on my hands, I can help prepare some of this if Bradley has printing resources available via Conservancy and can find some cheap folders at a dollar store to put stuff in for handouts if it gets too big to be just a couple pages stapled together.
Stephen Michael Kellat
On 01/12/2013 11:27 PM, Stephen Michael Kellat wrote:
Though my US passport is in good working order, I don't have the funds to travel to FOSDEM but do hope there will be audio and/or video for later download.
In all likelihood the talk will be recorded and audcasted on _Free as in Freedom_ at some later date.
As to making a release...what spurred this line of thought? Why then?
Well, I've already contemplated making a release in recent months. Since the FOSDEM talk is the first talk on copyleft-next, public or otherwise, it just seemed like a convenient time to make a release, as then I could say in the talk that "version 0.1.0 [or whatever] has been released". :)
Are there particular reporters going to be at the conference? Will you have small "press kits" containing at least a press release and a backgrounder in them that can be distributed so even non-specialist reporters can carry out "press release journalism" by just re-writing the press release?
If there is going to be an initial release we need to make sure it is a good unveiling. There needs to be a splash. Since the currently fabulous domestic job market leaves me with time on my hands, I can help prepare some of this
I appreciate the offer, but I'm kind of ambivalent about publicity at the moment.
if Bradley has printing resources available via Conservancy
I suspect Bradley would regard that as outside the proper scope of use of Conservancy resources (if only because copyleft-next is not a Conservancy member project), but I'm sure he'll confirm this in three or four months when he reads this message.
- RF
On Sat, Jan 12, 2013 at 7:44 PM, Richard Fontana fontana@sharpeleven.org wrote:
For anyone who'll be at FOSDEM, I am slated to give a talk on copyleft-next in the Legal Issues DevRoom (aka Legal and Policy Issues DevRoom) on Sunday (3 February).
I've continued to think about releasing an official version of copyleft-next (most likely numbered 0.1.0) and might do so around the time of FOSDEM.
Will the talk explain the purpose of c-l? :) It has been a very interesting and educational drafting exercise, so I'm glad to have participated here and will continue to do so, but I'm still unclear on what the long-term goal is. (Or perhaps to frame the question differently: what practical role in the licensing ecosystem does it fill that other licenses do not?)
Luis
On 01/15/2013 11:02 AM, Luis Villa wrote:
Will the talk explain the purpose of c-l? :)
Yes (though one response to the "What is the purpose" question is "why does there have to be a purpose?").
It has been a very interesting and educational drafting exercise, so I'm glad to have participated here and will continue to do so,
Thank you!
but I'm still unclear on what the long-term goal is. (Or perhaps to frame the question differently: what practical role in the licensing ecosystem does it fill that other licenses do not?)
A fair question or set of questions, which I haven't addressed too explicitly I suppose.
In a couple of talks I gave in 2012, I speculated that the GNU GPL license family might (as some have asserted is the case, citing or using data that admittedly has been questioned) be suffering competitive disadvantage relative to other licenses, principally popular noncopyleft licenses. I suggested that one set of reasons for this might be a suboptimal and unnecessary degree of general complexity and aesthetic baroqueness, associated particularly (other than as to LGPL, I suppose), though not exclusively, with the v3 license set. If this is true, and I don't know whether it is, I assert that it implies that the degree of strong copyleft licensing, particularly for newer free software projects, is lower than it *ought* to be, as there are no viable alternatives to the GNU GPL family for developers otherwise potentially favorable towards strong copyleft policy.
As a related point, I believe there is some continued commercial resistance to the GNU GPL license family (more so the v3 licenses than GPLv2, no doubt) and I believe this has some effect on upstream license use by projects that are not commercial as such, which goes beyond what one would expect if the only characteristic distinguishing copyleft from non-copyleft licenses were the minimum differential legal language necessary to implement the different legal policies of such licenses. I have encountered anecdotal evidence suggesting this is so. While the FSF has stated that widespread adoption, including commercial use, of the GNU GPL license family is not its goal, my own view is that strong copyleft licensing should reach a socially optimal level relative to weak copyleft and noncopyleft licensing (though admittedly I have no idea what that level is), and *unnecessary* barriers to strong copyleft license adoption are undesirable.
As a further related point, I have come to realize that the GNU GPL license family is subjected to stricter scrutiny than other widely-used FLOSS licenses, more for historical, social and political reasons than because of the objective merit of such licenses. To put it more simply, the GNU GPL license family carries a lot of 'baggage' and in some respects you could say the GNU GPL license family has been the victim of its own great success. It is possible that the only long-term way out of that is to start over from scratch and in a manner partially or wholly external to the FSF, which is essentially what copyleft-next has done (although the 'starting over from scratch' was not foreseeable at the outset).
So if you imagine either (a) copyleft-next being used by actual software projects, or (b) copyleft-next at least influencing future license drafting efforts by others (especially on the copyleft side, and above all on the GNU license family side), a speculative goal is that a structurally and aesthetically different license with approximately the same policy objective as GPLv2 will help correct what I believe may be a kind of market error, which is essentially this: that non-substantive characteristics of the GNU GPL are frustrating the policy objectives of the GNU GPL by having some inhibitive effect on license adoption and use.
That's one long-winded partial answer to the "goal" question. There are other goals, and other goals may yet emerge. At least one goal is personal (my personal feeling, which I can't shake, that GPLv3 is "unfinished", which I do not expect anyone else in the world to share). As I indicated above, though, I am not sure there has to be a goal in the sense you may mean. There are a few things that copyleft-next does that the GNU GPL licenses do not do (particularly the disincentives it creates for copyleft abuse by dual-licensing vendors and the like), and many things the GNU GPL (especially GPLv3) attempts to do that copyleft-next, at least in current form, deliberately does not try to do.
It doesn't quite answer your different question about "practical role", though I guess it implies an answer. If I thought GPLv2 and GPLv3 (and AGPLv3) were (a) perfect in some objective sense, or perfect apart from the special prerogative of their license steward to decide in the future that imperfections exist justifying license revisions, or (b) regarded as perfect by the "correct" amount of persons with a subjective view, I would see no particular purpose to copyleft-next other than as a purely artistic or scholarly exercise.
I suppose I should add something, which is that I have encountered from a few people the sense that there is something per se improper about copyleft-next because (as far as I can tell, this is the sentiment), if taken seriously, it is an effort to "change the way things are". This is a disturbingly conservative or reactionary view and if copyleft-next can do anything, however small, to challenge this sentiment I think it is worthwhile for that reason alone.
- RF
On 01/15/2013 12:01 PM, Richard Fontana wrote:
[...] So if you imagine [...] (a) copyleft-next being used by actual software projects [...]
For those software developers who are concerned about working on proper "open source" projects [0] and/or having their works of authorship be license compatible [1] with other "open source" projects at some point it may be important to seek a ruling from OSI [2] and FSF about the disposition of copyleft-next.
What do you think is required before copyleft-next could be submitted to OSI (for example)?
Regards,
--Tom
[0] http://opensource.org/faq#avoid-unapproved-licenses [1] in this context license compatibility would mean publicly accessible, third party statements from OSI and/or FSF such as https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses [2] http://opensource.org/approval
On 01/15/2013 01:31 PM, Tom Marble wrote:
On 01/15/2013 12:01 PM, Richard Fontana wrote:
[...] So if you imagine [...] (a) copyleft-next being used by actual software projects [...]
For those software developers who are concerned about working on proper "open source" projects [0] and/or having their works of authorship be license compatible [1] with other "open source" projects at some point it may be important to seek a ruling from OSI [2] and FSF about the disposition of copyleft-next.
Indeed.
What do you think is required before copyleft-next could be submitted to OSI (for example)?
This is something that I have been thinking about a lot recently. There is a well-publicized procedure for initiating the request for OSI approval of a license as 'Open Source'. I have not actually *looked at* the details of that procedure in a while, but I assume that if a numbered release of copyleft-next is made, seeking OSI approval would be a logical step. The objection that there is no software actually using the license raises an obvious chicken-egg issue related to the point you have made. It is a mark of the OSI's influence that a new license would *not* be used prior to OSI approval.
I suspect that the OSI would consider copyleft-next "redundant" in relation to licenses that are popular, widely-used or have strong communities (although I actually think that would be incorrect and am prepared to explain to the OSI why that is so), though I do not understand that to be a barrier to approval as such.
As for FSF, that is another matter. Unlike the OSI, the FSF does not (AFAIK, Josh Gay or [when he reads this in five months] Bradley can correct me if I'm wrong) have any sort of known *formal* approval process, and I do not know whether the FSF would be inclined to give an opinion on a license not yet in use for actual software of some non-marginal nature, although I believe there is past precedent at least with respect to essays analyzing new licenses by RMS.
- RF
[0] http://opensource.org/faq#avoid-unapproved-licenses [1] in this context license compatibility would mean publicly accessible, third party statements from OSI and/or FSF such as https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses [2] http://opensource.org/approval _______________________________________________ copyleft-next mailing list copyleft-next@lists.fedorahosted.org https://lists.fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/copyleft-next
On 01/15/2013 02:19 PM, Richard Fontana wrote:
As for FSF, that is another matter. Unlike the OSI, the FSF does not (AFAIK, Josh Gay or [when he reads this in five months] Bradley can correct me if I'm wrong) have any sort of known *formal* approval process, and I do not know whether the FSF would be inclined to give an opinion on a license not yet in use for actual software of some non-marginal nature, although I believe there is past precedent at least with respect to essays analyzing new licenses by RMS.
On 06/15/2013 02:28 PM, Josh Gay will write:
It is unlikely we would add it to our list of various licenses and comments about them page until either it has started to have widespread adoption or a lot of people began asking us for our opinion. But, there are other reasons we might consider adding it. For instance, if it turns out be so good we would recommend it over our existing licenses, then we would probably write extensively about it. Or, if it is so bad we wouldn't want anybody to use it, we might add it to the list to discourage people from using it.
On 01/15/2013 01:27 PM, Joshua Gay wrote:
On 06/15/2013 02:28 PM, Josh Gay will write: It is unlikely we would add it to our list of various licenses and comments about them page until either it has started to have widespread adoption or a lot of people began asking us for our opinion. [...]
It may be difficult to discuss a "release" of a copyleft-next license unless there is a "permalink" to point to. http://opensource.org/licenses/MPL-2.0 http://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-v10.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html (interestingly unversioned?)
Of course "beta" or 0.x "point" releases may not merit the finality that a permalink implies. Perhaps with a sufficiently easy UI simply using a "tag" from the VCS would be acceptable. For example, in viewing the history of a file: https://github.com/tmarble/gtk3py3/commits/master/README.md or specific tags: https://github.com/tmarble/kspsig/tags https://github.com/tmarble/kspsig/blob/v0.6/kspsig https://github.com/tmarble/kspsig/blob/v0.5/kspsig
Richard have you given any thought to how or where the license(s) would be "published"?
--Tom
On 01/16/2013 12:24 AM, Tom Marble wrote:
On 01/15/2013 01:27 PM, Joshua Gay wrote:
On 06/15/2013 02:28 PM, Josh Gay will write: It is unlikely we would add it to our list of various licenses and comments about them page until either it has started to have widespread adoption or a lot of people began asking us for our opinion. [...]
It may be difficult to discuss a "release" of a copyleft-next license unless there is a "permalink" to point to. http://opensource.org/licenses/MPL-2.0 http://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-v10.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html (interestingly unversioned?)
Of course "beta" or 0.x "point" releases may not merit the finality that a permalink implies. Perhaps with a sufficiently easy UI simply using a "tag" from the VCS would be acceptable. For example, in viewing the history of a file: https://github.com/tmarble/gtk3py3/commits/master/README.md or specific tags: https://github.com/tmarble/kspsig/tags https://github.com/tmarble/kspsig/blob/v0.6/kspsig https://github.com/tmarble/kspsig/blob/v0.5/kspsig
Richard have you given any thought to how or where the license(s) would be "published"?
I hadn't thought about permalinks as such.
I have had vague ideas for a copyleft-next website, and in fact it exists, but is quite minimal at the moment: http://copyleft-next.org/
But also, for some time I have had an empty 'Releases' directory in the file structure for the copyleft-next source repository, anticipating that numbered releases would be stored therein.
- RF
Hello,
On 01/16/2013 08:05 AM, Richard Fontana wrote:
On 01/16/2013 12:24 AM, Tom Marble wrote:
On 01/15/2013 01:27 PM, Joshua Gay wrote:
On 06/15/2013 02:28 PM, Josh Gay will write: It is unlikely we would add it to our list of various licenses and comments about them page until either it has started to have widespread adoption or a lot of people began asking us for our opinion. [...]
It may be difficult to discuss a "release" of a copyleft-next license unless there is a "permalink" to point to. http://opensource.org/licenses/MPL-2.0 http://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-v10.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html (interestingly unversioned?)
The FSF somewhat assumes use of their "version X or later" clause, in that case a permalink to https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html is perhaps appropriate.
However, they also have good links for each version, e.g.:
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.txt http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.txt http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html etc..
I hadn't thought about permalinks as such.
I have had vague ideas for a copyleft-next website, and in fact it exists, but is quite minimal at the moment: http://copyleft-next.org/
But also, for some time I have had an empty 'Releases' directory in the file structure for the copyleft-next source repository, anticipating that numbered releases would be stored therein.
I certainly would appreciate [1] good permanent links for each versioned release, preferably both a plain text and html version of the license.
Possibly also an unversioned link pointing to the latest version as the FSF does, if your intent is that copyleft-next is typically used with an "version X or later" clause.
-- kuno / warp.
[1] as some of you may know, one of my side projects is to build a database of free software / open source software / free culture license metadata, which benefits from having a good way to identify a particular license ( https://licensedb.org ).
On 01/16/2013 03:46 AM, Kuno Woudt wrote:
The FSF somewhat assumes use of their "version X or later" clause, in that case a permalink to https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html is perhaps appropriate.
However, they also have good links for each version, e.g.:
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.txt http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.txt http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html etc..
I hadn't thought about permalinks as such.
I have had vague ideas for a copyleft-next website, and in fact it exists, but is quite minimal at the moment: http://copyleft-next.org/
But also, for some time I have had an empty 'Releases' directory in the file structure for the copyleft-next source repository, anticipating that numbered releases would be stored therein.
I certainly would appreciate [1] good permanent links for each versioned release, preferably both a plain text and html version of the license.
Possibly also an unversioned link pointing to the latest version as the FSF does, if your intent is that copyleft-next is typically used with an "version X or later" clause.
This makes sense.
Note that copyleft-next currently has the rule "or-later by default, unless the licensor in question explicitly removes such permission.
- RF
-- kuno / warp.
[1] as some of you may know, one of my side projects is to build a database of free software / open source software / free culture license metadata, which benefits from having a good way to identify a particular license ( https://licensedb.org ).
copyleft-next mailing list copyleft-next@lists.fedorahosted.org https://lists.fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/copyleft-next
On 01/16/2013 03:46 AM, Kuno Woudt wrote:
The FSF somewhat assumes use of their "version X or later" clause, in that case a permalink to https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html is perhaps appropriate.
Well, that is one interpretation. Section 14 of GPLv3 states, "If the Program does not specify a version number of the GNU General Public License, you may choose any version ever published by the Free Software Foundation." So you could also look at it as us simply making the choice of choosing the latest version whenever a version number is not specified. =]
On 01/15/2013 01:19 PM, Richard Fontana wrote:
On 01/15/2013 01:31 PM, Tom Marble wrote:
On 01/15/2013 12:01 PM, Richard Fontana wrote:
[...] So if you imagine [...] (a) copyleft-next being used by actual software projects [...]
For those software developers who are concerned about working on proper "open source" projects [0] and/or having their works of authorship be license compatible [1] with other "open source" projects at some point it may be important to seek a ruling from OSI [2] and FSF about the disposition of copyleft-next.
Indeed.
One thought I had about the "chicken and egg" license approval problem is to use disjunctive licensing. For example, a new work might be licensed as "AGPLv3+ | copyleft-next".
In this way a work could be combined with "open source" works using the already approved license choice while promoting (and ideally providing upgrade compatibility with future versions of) copyleft-next.
However I wonder if the disjunction opens up any "escape hatches"? Currently the only issue that comes to mind is the weakening of the proprietary relicensing deflation provision. However, that would only really come into play if a wannabe huckster had aggregated copyright over the work... If a hacker publishes a work using the aforementioned disjunction, but does not give any copyright assignment or license, then it doesn't seem possible for a wannabe huckster to proprietorize... Does it?
Are there any other downsides to the disjunction (other than perhaps weakening the strength of copyleft)?
Regards,
--Tom
p.s. Has any thought been made towards an abbreviation of the license name (e.g. CL, CLN)?
On 01/16/2013 10:39 AM, Tom Marble wrote:
One thought I had about the "chicken and egg" license approval problem is to use disjunctive licensing. For example, a new work might be licensed as "AGPLv3+ | copyleft-next".
In this way a work could be combined with "open source" works using the already approved license choice while promoting (and ideally providing upgrade compatibility with future versions of) copyleft-next.
Good idea; I've thought of this too. It's a rare case where I think what would otherwise be a redundant disjunctive license makes a lot of sense.
However I wonder if the disjunction opens up any "escape hatches"? Currently the only issue that comes to mind is the weakening of the proprietary relicensing deflation provision. However, that would only really come into play if a wannabe huckster had aggregated copyright over the work... If a hacker publishes a work using the aforementioned disjunction, but does not give any copyright assignment or license, then it doesn't seem possible for a wannabe huckster to proprietorize... Does it?
If copyleft-next is part of the disjunction, the disincentives to proprietize remain present even if the other part of the disjunction is GPLvn/AGPLvn. Proprietization is possible if the wannabe huckster happens to have aggregated copyright permission allowing such proprietization.
Regards,
--Tom
p.s. Has any thought been made towards an abbreviation of the license name (e.g. CL, CLN)?
I have given a little thought to that.
An interesting point here is that "copyleft-next" has become the de facto name of the license without that ever having really been the intention -- "copyleft.next" was Bradley Kuhn's suggestion for a name for the *project* after the FSF and a few others objected to the earlier name "GPL.next" [I continue to regard those objections as without merit, but abandonment of "GPL.next" is probably for the best]). Luis Rodriguez later proposed "copyleft-next" instead of "copyleft.next". Anyway, all that is fine; I kind of like "copyleft-next" as a name, and I especially like the fact that the word "license" isn't formally part of the name, which is (I think) a novel feature.
I've thought of "CLN" as a decent three-letter initialism. If anyone has any better suggestions, though, I would be interested in hearing them.
Of course we'll know when copyleft-next has 'made it' when the SPDX people come up with an official abbreviation. :-)
- RF
Hello,
On 01/16/2013 05:06 PM, Richard Fontana wrote:
On 01/16/2013 10:39 AM, Tom Marble wrote:
p.s. Has any thought been made towards an abbreviation of the license name (e.g. CL, CLN)?
I have given a little thought to that.
Abbreviations make sense when the long name is unwieldy, "Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 UK: Scotland" is abbreviated to "CC BY-SA 2.5 SCOTLAND".
But "copyleft-next" as a string already is shorter than "CC BY-SA 2.5 SCOTLAND", even if you include a full "x.x.x" version. So, does it really need abbreviating? ;-)
-- kuno.
On Thu, Jan 17, 2013 at 5:06 AM, Kuno Woudt kuno@frob.nl wrote:
does it really need abbreviating?
I'm inclined to agree. There are a few instances of CLN already on the books[1]. I don't think it helps communication clarity to add yet another acronym.
[1] http://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/CLN
On 01/17/2013 09:39 AM, Ben Cotton wrote:
On Thu, Jan 17, 2013 at 5:06 AM, Kuno Woudt kuno@frob.nl wrote:
does it really need abbreviating?
I'm inclined to agree. There are a few instances of CLN already on the books[1]. I don't think it helps communication clarity to add yet another acronym.
And we don't want opponents of copyleft-next calling it the "Corn Lethal Necrosis license". :)
On 01/17/2013 05:06 AM, Kuno Woudt wrote:
Hello,
On 01/16/2013 05:06 PM, Richard Fontana wrote:
On 01/16/2013 10:39 AM, Tom Marble wrote:
p.s. Has any thought been made towards an abbreviation of the license name (e.g. CL, CLN)?
I have given a little thought to that.
Abbreviations make sense when the long name is unwieldy, "Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 UK: Scotland" is abbreviated to "CC BY-SA 2.5 SCOTLAND".
But "copyleft-next" as a string already is shorter than "CC BY-SA 2.5 SCOTLAND", even if you include a full "x.x.x" version. So, does it really need abbreviating? ;-)
Good point. Syllable-wise it is already quite short ("copyleft-next" and "the GPL" both have four syllables). OTOH textually "copyleft-next" is significantly longer than "GPLvn", etc.
- RF
On Tue, Jan 15, 2013 at 10:01 AM, Richard Fontana fontana@sharpeleven.org wrote:
On 01/15/2013 11:02 AM, Luis Villa wrote:
Will the talk explain the purpose of c-l? :)
Yes (though one response to the "What is the purpose" question is "why does there have to be a purpose?").
I would say that it must have a purpose, because the cost of introducing a new license is high; in particular, by creating more choices for everyone, it means all participants in our ecosystem must learn something new and face additional complexity every time they make a licensing decision.
This isn't to say that there should never be new licenses, just that authors owe it to the broader community to consider these costs, and ask the community to incur the costs only when there is a describable, positive benefit to be gained. (AGPL and GPL v3, for example, would clear this bar- they obviously addressed new, important issues. MPL 2 is a closer case, though in its favor, the clearly-defined upgrade mechanism and explicit deprecation by the license author mitigate some of the cost by replacing an existing, older license.)
Sadly, I think this burden is higher for Serious Authors like you, Richard, because your license is less likely to be ignored and therefore more likely to impose costs on everyone.
It has been a very interesting and educational drafting exercise, so I'm glad to have participated here and will continue to do so,
Thank you!
but I'm still unclear on what the long-term goal is. (Or perhaps to frame the question differently: what practical role in the licensing ecosystem does it fill that other licenses do not?)
A fair question or set of questions, which I haven't addressed too explicitly I suppose.
In a couple of talks I gave in 2012, I speculated that the GNU GPL license family might (as some have asserted is the case, citing or using data that admittedly has been questioned) be suffering competitive disadvantage relative to other licenses, principally popular noncopyleft licenses. I suggested that one set of reasons for this might be a suboptimal and unnecessary degree of general complexity and aesthetic baroqueness, associated particularly (other than as to LGPL, I suppose), though not exclusively, with the v3 license set.
I think this is true (for both v2 and 3). To what extent the complexity/baroqueness is the driver is less clear. It is definitely a factor, but as you say, it is one of many issues.
If this is true, and I don't know whether it is, I assert that it implies that the degree of strong copyleft licensing, particularly for newer free software projects, is lower than it *ought* to be, as there are no viable alternatives to the GNU GPL family for developers otherwise potentially favorable towards strong copyleft policy.
As a related point, I believe there is some continued commercial resistance to the GNU GPL license family (more so the v3 licenses than GPLv2, no doubt) and I believe this has some effect on upstream license use by projects that are not commercial as such, which goes beyond what one would expect if the only characteristic distinguishing copyleft from non-copyleft licenses were the minimum differential legal language necessary to implement the different legal policies of such licenses. I have encountered anecdotal evidence suggesting this is so.
Could you elaborate a bit on this? My sense is that the primary objection for commercial users of the license has to do with the nature of the copyleft rather than the specific language that implements the copyleft, so for *commercial* adoption I think the drafting question is definitely only marginal in effect. [Not to say a rewrite wouldn't help commercial adoption, but that it is far from the primary issue.]
<snip>
As a further related point, I have come to realize that the GNU GPL license family is subjected to stricter scrutiny than other widely-used FLOSS licenses, more for historical, social and political reasons than because of the objective merit of such licenses. To put it more simply, the GNU GPL license family carries a lot of 'baggage' and in some respects you could say the GNU GPL license family has been the victim of its own great success. It is possible that the only long-term way out of that is to start over from scratch and in a manner partially or wholly external to the FSF, which is essentially what copyleft-next has done (although the 'starting over from scratch' was not foreseeable at the outset).
So if you imagine either (a) copyleft-next being used by actual software projects, or (b) copyleft-next at least influencing future license drafting efforts by others (especially on the copyleft side, and above all on the GNU license family side), a speculative goal is that a structurally and aesthetically different license with approximately the same policy objective as GPLv2 will help correct what I believe may be a kind of market error, which is essentially this: that non-substantive characteristics of the GNU GPL are frustrating the policy objectives of the GNU GPL by having some inhibitive effect on license adoption and use.
That's one long-winded partial answer to the "goal" question. There are other goals, and other goals may yet emerge. At least one goal is personal (my personal feeling, which I can't shake, that GPLv3 is "unfinished", which I do not expect anyone else in the world to share).
I certainly sympathize :)
As I indicated above, though, I am not sure there has to be a goal in the sense you may mean. There are a few things that copyleft-next does that the GNU GPL licenses do not do (particularly the disincentives it creates for copyleft abuse by dual-licensing vendors and the like), and many things the GNU GPL (especially GPLv3) attempts to do that copyleft-next, at least in current form, deliberately does not try to do.
It doesn't quite answer your different question about "practical role", though I guess it implies an answer.
It does. At least, it gives me a rationale I could explain to others as to both why the license exists and why they might want to use it, and which I can use to help guide my contributions. Which is a big step. (I am not sure the goal is attainable but at least I grok it now.)
I suppose I should add something, which is that I have encountered from a few people the sense that there is something per se improper about copyleft-next because (as far as I can tell, this is the sentiment), if taken seriously, it is an effort to "change the way things are". This is a disturbingly conservative or reactionary view and if copyleft-next can do anything, however small, to challenge this sentiment I think it is worthwhile for that reason alone.
For what it is worth, I do not subscribe to that sentiment.
Luis
On 01/15/2013 10:03 PM, Luis Villa wrote:
On Tue, Jan 15, 2013 at 10:01 AM, Richard Fontana fontana@sharpeleven.org wrote:
On 01/15/2013 11:02 AM, Luis Villa wrote:
Will the talk explain the purpose of c-l? :)
Yes (though one response to the "What is the purpose" question is "why does there have to be a purpose?").
I would say that it must have a purpose, because the cost of introducing a new license is high; in particular, by creating more choices for everyone, it means all participants in our ecosystem must learn something new and face additional complexity every time they make a licensing decision.
This isn't to say that there should never be new licenses, just that authors owe it to the broader community to consider these costs, and ask the community to incur the costs only when there is a describable, positive benefit to be gained. (AGPL and GPL v3, for example, would clear this bar- they obviously addressed new, important issues. MPL 2 is a closer case, though in its favor, the clearly-defined upgrade mechanism and explicit deprecation by the license author mitigate some of the cost by replacing an existing, older license.)
Sadly, I think this burden is higher for Serious Authors like you, Richard, because your license is less likely to be ignored and therefore more likely to impose costs on everyone.
That is quite flattering, but I do not think I deserve such flattery. :-) Nevertheless, I understand what you are saying.
If this is true, and I don't know whether it is, I assert that it implies that the degree of strong copyleft licensing, particularly for newer free software projects, is lower than it *ought* to be, as there are no viable alternatives to the GNU GPL family for developers otherwise potentially favorable towards strong copyleft policy.
As a related point, I believe there is some continued commercial resistance to the GNU GPL license family (more so the v3 licenses than GPLv2, no doubt) and I believe this has some effect on upstream license use by projects that are not commercial as such, which goes beyond what one would expect if the only characteristic distinguishing copyleft from non-copyleft licenses were the minimum differential legal language necessary to implement the different legal policies of such licenses. I have encountered anecdotal evidence suggesting this is so.
Could you elaborate a bit on this? My sense is that the primary objection for commercial users of the license has to do with the nature of the copyleft rather than the specific language that implements the copyleft, so for *commercial* adoption I think the drafting question is definitely only marginal in effect. [Not to say a rewrite wouldn't help commercial adoption, but that it is far from the primary issue.]
I agree it is not the primary issue. I would also say that the commercial objection to copyleft specifically has to do with (sometimes severely-mistaken) perceptions of FSF-influenced interpretation of the GPL (which copyleft-next implicitly accepts as essentially correct from a policy standpoint).
Nevertheless, it's at least an interesting secondary issue. As noted it is more of an issue with the v3 family. Current copyleft-next discards whole provisions of GPLv3: listing the more interesting ones here: * the anti-anti-circumvention provision * the two Microsoft-Novell-deal-inspired provisions in GPLv3 section 11 * the "knowingly-relying" (aka "son of downstream shielding") provision of GPLv3 section 11 * the reservation-of-implied-patent-licenses clause of GPLv3 section 11 (a recent deletion) * the entirety of the anti-lockdown half of GPLv3 section 6
Also, more interesting from a GPLv2-oriented perspective, copyleft-next goes further than GPLv3 in making the 'liberty-or-death' clause merely a clarification of the 'no further restrictions' rule. (Though as Bradley has interestingly noted, there is an argument that copyleft-next has broadened liberty-or-death by not limiting it to a condition on distribution. That goes into the still-nonexistent issue tracker.)
All of the above provisions in my anecdotal-ish experience have met with some commercial resistance (though really far less than one might have expected). That itself isn't a reason to get rid of them in copyleft-next (viewed as a sort of GPL fork), but what is a reason to get rid of them is that such provisions don't actually accomplish enough to justify whatever commercial friction exists -- the anti-lockdown provisions *may* be a very important exception here (though I'm not yet convinced of that). By constrast, while basic FSF-interpretation strong copyleft also meets with commercial resistance, this seems to be basically justified, the principal problem being that FSF interpretation is not sufficiently well understood by commercial vendors.
For the best example of what I'm getting at, consider a provision of GPLv3 that was not deleted, but which was structurally transformed: the patent license grant of GPLv3 section 11 paragraphs 1-3. I do not think the underlying 'deep structure' of the patent license grants of GPLv3 and copyleft-next are different, but I think their textual implementations *look* dramatically different to the average risk-averse corporate IP lawyer. Maybe the difference is still quite marginal, though, so this point may well be smaller than I am making it out to be.
That's one long-winded partial answer to the "goal" question. There are other goals, and other goals may yet emerge. At least one goal is personal (my personal feeling, which I can't shake, that GPLv3 is "unfinished", which I do not expect anyone else in the world to share).
I certainly sympathize :)
I thought you might understand what I mean. :)
- RF
On 01/15/2013 11:11 PM, Richard Fontana wrote:
Also, more interesting from a GPLv2-oriented perspective, copyleft-next goes further than GPLv3 in making the 'liberty-or-death' clause merely a clarification of the 'no further restrictions' rule. (Though as Bradley has interestingly noted, there is an argument that copyleft-next has broadened liberty-or-death by not limiting it to a condition on distribution. That goes into the still-nonexistent issue tracker.)
I just realized that if I interpreted Bradley's statement on this issue correctly, he is wrong. In five months or so when he reads this he can clarify (or perhaps I'll discuss it with him on the flight to Brussels). In any case the issue remains in the nonexistent issue tracker.
- RF
On 01/12/2013 10:44 PM, Richard Fontana wrote:
For anyone who'll be at FOSDEM, I am slated to give a talk on copyleft-next in the Legal Issues DevRoom (aka Legal and Policy Issues DevRoom) on Sunday (3 February).
This did in fact take place and rather to my surprise the room was full.
I fear that jet lag effects, sleep deprivation, and the like may have limited the effectiveness of the presentation, but I'm hoping the recording comes out okay. I will post my slides in due course.
- RF
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