[copyleft-next] Update 2012-08-15

Luis Villa luis at tieguy.org
Thu Aug 16 01:31:12 UTC 2012


On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 5:45 PM, Richard Fontana
<fontana at sharpeleven.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Here's yet another weekly update on what's been going on with the
> copyleft-next draft.
>
> One of the more interesting changes I made this week was in the 'Later
> License Versions' section (as it is now known). It was previously
> written as a built-in "or-later" provision of the sort we see in a
> number of FLOSS licenses such as MPL and EPL. I (for lack of any
> better alternative) used 'the Copyleft-Next Group' (now the
> 'Copyleft-Next Project') as the name of the license steward authorized
> to publish newer versions of the license. I have now revised this to
> state that any newer version released by said Copyleft-Next Project
> will not be 'Authorized' unless it is approved as such (as a sucessor
> to the earlier copyleft-next) by both the FSF and the OSI.

Can you clarify what this means, as OSI does not confirm "successors" per se?

>  Cf.
> the mostly-ignored 'proxy' provision in the corresponding sections of
> (A)GPLv3.

Which I really liked, actually, but were unworkable for compatibility
reasons - if LO designates the LO Foundation as "proxy" for
MPL2-licensed code, and Mozilla designates MoFo, what happens to mixed
code?

> I have mostly deleted an earlier idea of listing representative
> permissive licenses as inbound-compatible to guide interpretation of
> what "Further Restrictions" means. Instead, I assume that figuring out
> inbound license compatibility will be no more difficult than it was
> under GPLv2. The one exception is that I explicitly provide for
> Apache License 2.0 compatibility, because this is both useful and
> necessary.

I am tempted to say that, once this language is refined, it should be
split off and turned into a general-purpose additional permission
exception for GPL *2*.

> I reduced the 'Minimum Period' for Corresponding Source availability,
> where CS is made available on the net, from 3 years to 2 years, on the
> assumption that this was not problematic.

Any specified length of time is problematic for daily-build QA
strategies (unless the language allows pointing to a specific RCS
revision as acceptable source); this was one of our primary reasons
for avoiding it in MPL.

> I broadened and put into a separate section what has been called the
> proprietary-relicensing 'poison pill' (I briefly used that as the
> section title). Now, if the original licensor proprietary-relicenses,
> most of the conditions of the license vanish for the licensee, so
> copyleft-next turns into an ultra-permissive license. On the other
> hand, the provision is narrowed to apply only where the
> proprietary-relicensing is done for "commercial gain".

Which means... what, exactly? :)

Luis


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