[copyleft-next] Some initial comments on the copyleft-next draft

Richard Fontana fontana at sharpeleven.org
Tue Jul 31 01:49:24 UTC 2012


On 07/30/2012 07:28 PM, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote:
> Richard Fontana wrote:
>> the actual license notice, which Bradley and I came up with, said this:
>>
>>   This notice constitutes a grant of such permission as is necessary
>>   to combine or link this software, or a modified version of it, with
>>   Request Tracker (RT), published by Jesse Vincent and Best Practical
>>   Solutions, LLC, or a derivative work of RT, and to copy, modify, and
>>   distribute the resulting work.  RT is licensed under version 2 of
>>   the GNU General Public License.
>>
>> *At the time* I considered this clever.
> 
> 
> I still consider it clever, in the sense that it punts all decisions of
> license compatibility between GPLv2 and AGPLv3 for the specific
> circumstance to a Court.  I still wonder sometimes if additional
> permissions of that nature might be the future of cross-copyleft
> compatibility.

Maybe they are the only way to explicitly resolve historical
cross-copyleft incompatibilities (in practice they seem to be resolved
implicitly in many cases). I've become more skeptical of the value of
additional permissions (or 'exceptions' as they were called in the
pre-GPLv3 era) because of the complexity cost they add to a given
licensing situation.

With respect to the license of stet, I am reminded of Michael Meeks'
reference to the possible need for an "ALGPL" (I forget the precise
term he used) in his talk at FOSDEM. A suitable integral weak copyleft
variety of AGPL presumably could have been applied to stet such that
the clever notice wouldn't have been necessary. (I'm not sure if the
notice even *was* necessary, but I don't remember much about how stet
and RT fit together.)

- Richard






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