[copyleft-next] Numbering of first release

Richard Fontana fontana at sharpeleven.org
Wed Nov 21 02:52:06 UTC 2012


On 11/20/2012 09:19 PM, Ben Cotton wrote:
> Having no experience in this area, I'm delightfully unencumbered by
> any historical context. Before I form my opinion, I wonder what the
> purpose behind numbering a release is at this point? Are we saying
> that copyleft-next is ready to be used or just that it's sufficiently
> mature to be reviewed by people who haven't been watching the
> development process (incidentally, I have a lot of commit messages to
> catch up on)?

I actually do think it is ready to be used. It's not perfect, but no
one can seriously say that any of the relatively popular FLOSS
licenses is in any *better* shape.

I know I got out of the habit of semi-weekly updates. Partly this was
because I got busier with other things from the end of the summer on,
but partly also it was that it seemed that improvements were going to
be *very* gradual anyway (unless a lot more people got more actively
involved). I think the updates would have gotten kind of boring, but
people can see the commit logs.

However, in addition to your comment about needing to catch up on
commits, the redoubtable Bradley Kuhn has said that he intends to make
some comments on some recent changes (such as my deletion of "ws-supp"
which I think he may have found disturbing). (To the extent that my
previous non-disclosure of such conversation [medium forgotten] was a
Harvey Birdman Rule violation, I have now cured it.) So I guess I'm
not the only busy person. :)

> As for the anti-feature nature of license stability, I understand your
> view from an academic perspective, but I wonder what effect a
> rapidly-evolving license would have on adoption and enforcement.

Well, after sending that message I realized that "rapidly-evolving"
gives the wrong impression. I actually mean something more like
"slowly changing but with lots of point releases so that the
improvements can be applied right away [unless the licensor has said
otherwise]". I'm reminded of how some critics of GPLv3 argued that
there should have been the equivalent of mere "bug fixes" of GPLv2
instead rather than the more substantial changes from GPLv2 to GPLv3.
One could imagine the FSF having done such "bug fixes" over the years
in a series of GPLv2.x releases, as they did in releasing LGPLv2.1
(containing a minor change from LGPLv2) in 1999. Maybe that would have
created an atmosphere of greater instability that would have limited
adoption of the GPL (in its various versions) generally.

It is also worth remembering that the GPL actually did evolve fairly
rapidly from its earliest versions in the latter 1980s to 1991, with
the release of GPLv2. There were just two years between GPLv1 and
GPLv2. I wonder if RMS/the FSF in 1991 assumed that GPLv3 would be
released by 1993 or so.

- RF






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