[copyleft-next] Platonic ideals, restrictiveness and weaker copyleft

Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn zooko at zooko.com
Mon Aug 6 17:37:33 UTC 2012


On Wed, Aug 1, 2012 at 9:35 AM, Richard Fontana <fontana at sharpeleven.org> wrote:
>
> To put it another way,
> we are entering an era where experimentation in licensing seems to be
> actively discouraged for what appear to be political reasons rather
> than reasons grounded in principle. Zooko's TGPPL, discussed earlier
> on this list, was an earlier casualty of this development.

It is a great relief to hear you speak sympathetically about that
episode. I'm sorry to say it, but I'm still angry and hurt about my
experiences in that process.

However, I must say that those who opposed TGPPL at that time probably
had principled reasons to do so, including their concern about
"licence proliferation" and other legitimate concerns. (Mike Linksva
has raised some objections to the TGPPL idea on this list.) What was
not principled was their *method* of opposing it, which was to use
OSI's power of denying "Open Source Definition" certification even
though they did not appear to disbelieve that TGPPL was compliant with
the Open Source Definition. Certain people also used the technique of
being personally abusive toward me until I was no longer willing to
continue to argue.

Here are all the entries on my blog about that:

https://lafsgateway.zooko.com/uri/URI:DIR2-RO:d73ap7mtjvv7y6qsmmwqwai4ii:tq5tqejzulg7yj4h7nxuurpiuuz5jsgvczmdamcalpk2rc6gmbsq/klog.html#2008-12-15%202009-01-14%202009-01-20%202009-01-26%202009-02-03%202009-02-05%202009-02-17%202009-02-18%202009-06-09%20[[The%20Open%20Source%20Initiative%20Stumbles]]%20[[deterring%20licence%20proliferation%20by%20withholding%20the%20stamp%20of%20OSD-conformance]]

I would like to help draft a "TGPPLv2" which is expressed as an
additional permission on AGPLv3. I am also very interested in a
transitive grace period patch to copyleft-next that I've read about on
this thread but have not yet seen.

I'm thinking about the license-compatibility issues that have been
recently discussed on this list. I value licence-compatibility and I
value being able to practically use a licence in the near term for
real value.

Disclosure: I'm the founder and CEO of a tiny startup --
https://leastauthority.com -- that is selling a service based on the
Tahoe-LAFS software, which is dual-licensed under GPLv2+|TGPPLv1+. Our
company is producing a lot of new source code, funded by a research
grant from DARPA, which we are contributing to the Tahoe-LAFS project
under those same dual-licensing terms.

Regards,

Zooko


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