[copyleft-next] Can a copyleft requirement ever go "too far"? (was Re: in defense of the TGPPL idea)

Bradley M. Kuhn bkuhn at ebb.org
Tue Jul 31 23:35:34 UTC 2012


>> I'd like to point out that the GPL family, pre-v3, always had this.
>> You could drift from LGPLv2 up to GPLv2 or remove GPLv2 exceptions
>> and put the code into pure GPLv2 projects.  It's only the release of
>> GPLv3 that led to any rancor about this issue.

Theodore Ts'o wrote at 23:13 (EDT) on Monday:
> [BSD folks'] complaint was about the same kind of asymmetry; the fact
> that GPL projects can take form BSD projects, but not vice versa.

Indeed, you're correct.  I wasn't as precise as I should have been: I
was referring primarily to cross-copyleft rancor.

> While you could claim that is an essential "feature" of the BSD
> licese, nevertheless the asymmetry can cause people to think that
> there's something unfair going on.

I am familiar that BSD attitude, but I admit I really don't understand
it.  The GPL is clearly less restrictive than Apple's licenses, yet the
same BSD folks who don't like their code ending up in Linux are excited
to see it end up in Apple products.  I remain befuddled: the only
logically consistent position is to hate both Apple licensing and GPL
equally, or to hate neither.

> The rancor comes when you have people who feel strongly about a
> particular philosophical issue; whether it's the BSD vs. GPL issue, or
> the anti-Tivo clause.  Having been on both sides of the asymmetry, I
> have a lot of sympathy for both sides of the argument.

I do indeed get what you're saying.  OTOH, I think the central place of
our disagreement is a disagreement about how much "copyleft" a copyleft
license should try to do.

For example, supposed someone took the position that LGPLv2 was such a
good license that one shouldn't ever be able to make GPLv2'd
combinations to LGPLv2'd programs.  Nearly everyone would disagree with
this position, I suspect.

By way of analogy, I feel basically the same way most feel about LGPLv2
-> GPLv2 migration about the GPLv3-plus-permission-to-lock-down ->
pure-GPLv3.

Granted, I've never seen this from both sides of the argument.  I don't
know of a strong copyleft requirement I dislike so much that I want to
draw a line further back and call stronger copylefts the same as
proprietary requirements.  It seems that some call anti-lock-down the
equivalent of what Apple does with lock-down.


This is all a matter of degree.  IIUC, you're arguing anti-lock-down
takes copyleft too far.  Theo would argue that *any* copyleft
requirement takes it too far.

> As a result, if someone is starting a new project, or writing new
> code, and has very strong feelings about a particular "additional
> permission", I can completely understand and sympathize with that
> person not wanting the "additional permission" to be stripped out,

The additional permission doesn't get stripped off of the version the
original author wrote; it's only stripped out on the modified version.
Someone could always go upstream for the original version.

The question really comes down to whether or not the person make the
additional-permission-less changes was making changes that were really
valuable to the codebase.  If they were, it's really a "let the market
decide what license it wants".  If they weren't, who cares anyway?

I think we may be closer on this subject than it seems, based on our
previous conversations about it.  But, perhaps I've misunderstood your
position.


Still, I like that Fontana is thinking about how to solve this
cross-compatibility question in copyleft-next.
-- 
   -- bkuhn


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