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.