To quote section 8 of copyleft-next-0.3.1: ` 8. Copyleft Sunset
The conditions in sections 3 through 5 no longer apply once fifteen years have elapsed from the date of My first Distribution of My Work under this License. ' I feel that addressing copyright obsolescence should be follow whatever the copyright law says - which is currently 120 years or the author's lifetime plus 70 years - because the issue I am seeing with the "Copyleft Sunset" clause is that it puts free software as a disadvantage in comparison to non-free software. As a free software maximalist I want all software in the world to never be proprietary including the old software that I wrote ages ago and nobody uses anymore, I want that too to remain free forever and after.
On Tue, Jul 27, 2021 at 10:47:55PM -0000, Solomon B wrote:
To quote section 8 of copyleft-next-0.3.1: ` 8. Copyleft Sunset
The conditions in sections 3 through 5 no longer apply once fifteen years have elapsed from the date of My first Distribution of My Work under this License. ' I feel that addressing copyright obsolescence should be follow whatever
the copyright law says - which is currently 120 years or the author's lifetime plus 70 years - because the issue I am seeing with the "Copyleft Sunset" clause is that it puts free software as a disadvantage in comparison to non-free software. As a free software maximalist I want all software in the world to never be proprietary including the old software that I wrote ages ago and nobody uses anymore, I want that too to remain free forever and after.
On this day 15 years ago I was working as a community college librarian in the Territory of American Samoa with a MacBook as my personal home computer and a desktop computer at work running Windows XP. The Raspberry Pi and BeagleBoard classes of single board computers were not even on the market yet. Arduino wasn't on the market yet either although you could find the BASIC Stamp at the time readily available. Things have thankfully changed a wee bit since then.
Yes, the sunset clause disincentivizes use of this license for software that might eventually become retro-tech. Increasingly systems are developing in so many ways that I have no idea what we will see by 2036. Would a program written today be able to function unadapted and without changes then?
If an exception to the license is needed to account for legacy uses then that could be arranged between the author of The Work and those seeking the exception.
Well, I do not argue whether 15 years is a good limit I simply do not want "My work" to ever limit anyone's freedom; not now, nor a millennium afterwards.
My understanding is that the copyleft sunset was added as some sort of commentary on the seemingly never-ending length of copyright.
But at the same time all of those retroactive and future time extensions that have happened (at least in the U.S.) only make copyleft stronger, IMHO. Having pushed for strong copyleft adoption it feels strange to systematically adopt a method to end it in a rote automatic way without further consideration of the situation for a particular work. The copyleft sunset is one of my reasons for not using copyleft-next and why I continue to use the AGPLv3-or-later, which would tie the end of the copyleft to the end of the copyright. That, and the lack of a network services clause.
On 7/28/21 1:47 AM, Solomon B wrote:
I feel that addressing copyright obsolescence should be follow whatever the copyright law says - which is currently 120 years or the author's lifetime plus 70 years - because the issue I am seeing with the "Copyleft Sunset" clause is that it puts free software as a disadvantage in comparison to non-free software. As a free software maximalist I want all software in the world to never be proprietary including the old software that I wrote ages ago and nobody uses anymore, I want that too to remain free forever and after.
[I'm just a developer, thus my opinion most likely is wrong.]
I think I've misunderstood the "sunset clause" because I see there are (at least) two possible interpretations:
(A) (the interpretation I think was made by Solomon in the beginning of this thread) that after 15 years, the license basically "dissolves" and applies no more, thus the covered work becomes "closed";
(B) (my own interpretation) that after 15 years, only the sections 3 to 5 "dissolve", and thus the only requirements a "distributor" must obey to is to put a link to this license and not strip any "notices" from the source code (if he does distribute the code); basically I think the license becomes a form of BSD / MIT license; (moreover clause 7, nullification of copyleft in case of proprietary dual proprietary licensing, uses a similar wording, and from what I understand the outcome of clause 7 is practically that the code becomes public domain;)
Thus in a sense, indeed after 15 years, the covered work becomes "less free" in the sense that a "distributor" could take the code, change it, deploy it in an embedded device which he sells, without any requirements to make the changes available under the same license to the buyers. And I assume this could be bad especially in the light of "right to repair", and as someone else pointed out retro computing.
On the other hand it is perhaps a good thing, because other work that is more generic (like basic data structure libraries or mathematical libraries) could be easily relicensed to whatever licenses are available at that time, without needing the approval of all the copyright holders.
However I do have a question regarding the sunset clause: does it apply to the entire "covered work" as a whole, or to each individual source code file (as the "smallest unit of covered work")?
Think about the following scenario: we have a library composed of 100 files; most of them haven't been touched in 15 years, but only a few of them are regularly updated (most likely to keep the code from compiling). Could one apply the sunset clause only to those older files and perhaps re-use them in another without obeying clauses 3 through 5? (Indeed assuming the files are 15 years old, one could find a release from 15 years ago, apply the sunset clause to that entire release as a whole covered work, and extract only the relevant files.)
In the end I think a FAQ section describing the intent, interpretation and consequences of each of the clauses might be useful.
Ciprian.
Another interesting clause that is expired by the copyleft sunset clause is the ability for recipients to enforce the license. To quote an excerpt from section 5 ` Each direct and indirect recipient of the Covered Work from You is an intended third-party beneficiary of this License solely as to this section 5, with the right to enforce its terms. '
This clause gives individual recipients of the software the ability to claim their rights to use, modify, reinstall, and redistribute the software.
I cannot understand why would user rights be made temporarily enforceable. In case of proprietary copyright, it makes total sense to limit the period in which the author is allowed to be greedy, but not so with copyleft.
It makes more sense to make proprietary software as well as permissively licensed software fall back to Copyleft after a certain period of time. Meaning, that one who does incorporate permissively licensed software within a proprietary software product, could only do it for a period of time, after which they would have to release the source code of the entire work including the proprietary parts under a perpetual copyleft license that give the rights back to the users in a permanent way such that any further proprietarization of the software is not possible.
copyleft-next@lists.fedorahosted.org
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Ciprian Craciun -
Jason Self -
Solomon B -
Stephen Kellat