[copyleft-next] Question about section 11. Termination

Richard Fontana fontana at sharpeleven.org
Thu Feb 7 06:05:26 UTC 2013


On 01/27/2013 02:50 AM, Richard Fontana wrote:
> On 01/27/2013 01:52 AM, Joshua Gay wrote:
>> Let's say I lose my rights under ยง11 to the Covered Work. Could I ask a
>> friend to give me a copy of the same Covered Work under the GNU GPL
>> version 3 (via section 10) and then redistribute the covered work under
>> the GNU GPL version 3?
> 
> This is a *very* interesting question. It raises a problem that arises
> much more generally in free software. It is what I call the "magic
> relicensing problem". The general approach has been to sweep this
> under the rug.
> 
> It also relates closely to a question @vanden was raising on identi.ca
> - he asked whether the basic copyleft requirement in section 5
> conflicted with section 10.
[...]
> The solution I'm thinking of is that section 10 should be limited to
> 'Derived Works'. After all, why would one ever need to distribute
> copyleft-next under GPL/AGPL other than in what the FSF, certainly,
> would consider a 'Derived Work' scenario (using the terminology of
> copyleft-next -- a 'work based on the Program' or 'modified version'
> in GPLv3 parlance). Going further, maybe section 10 should be folded
> into section 5. You can Distribute a Derived Work under one of the
> following licenses:
> i) this License
> ii) a Later Version (unless We have explicitly said you can't)
> iii) GPLv2, AGPLv3, or later versions
> 
> If that were the case, then (let's say I'm the copyleft-next upstream
> licensor) your friend can't give you an unmodified version of the same
> work under GPLv3. He or she can give you a 'Derived Work' licensed
> under GPLv3. However, I don't think this means I am giving *you* a
> GPLv3 license as to what I wrote.

Pam Chestek raised a related issue in a github pull request:
"Based on paragraph 6, the Received Work is licensed to the
distributee under copyleft-next, so it's only the Derived Work that
would be under an alternative license. And maybe not even really that;
it might be just the delta between the Received Work and the Derived
Work that would be under the new license. But I concede that my
change, although I believe more accurate, might create confusion."

I am tracking the underlying issue here on github at
https://github.com/richardfontana/copyleft-next/issues/30

- RF






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