[copyleft-next] comments on 0.1.1

Richard Fontana fontana at sharpeleven.org
Sat Feb 9 16:45:57 UTC 2013


On Fri, Feb 08, 2013 at 10:44:14PM -0500, Pamela Chestek wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 10:15 PM, Richard Fontana
> <fontana at sharpeleven.org> wrote:

> > ii) Foo Inc., which has a proprietary software product P, is acquired
> > by Bar Inc. Bar continues the ongoing business of Foo wrt P, but
> > intends to transition towards what I'm afraid (as I believe you know)
> > some companies call "open sourcing" of P. The process may be such that
> > proprietary P will be distributed simultaneously with copyleft-next P
> > during some time period.

> I had to go back and look at the language, because I hadn't thought of
> the "open sourcing" scenario (ii) and wasn't sure that in that case
> the evaporation would work.  I'm still not sure, although I'm not
> entirely sure why.  I think the word "offer" is what throws me off and
> wonder whether it might be understood to mean "initial offer." If so,
> then the initial offer was before the copyleft-next licensing and the
> evaporation doesn't come to pass.  If you struck "offer to" would that
> hurt anything, i.e., "If, more than one year after Our first
> Distribution of the Received Work under this License, We license a
> work that would be a Covered Work had You prepared it, ...."?
> Removing the word "offer" removes any possible interpretation that it
> might mean "initial offer."  But maybe it's just me.

This was a relatively recent change. Here's the commit message:

commit 415df2df927f6153032923b5d28f758784af2976
Author: Richard Fontana <fontana at sharpeleven.org>
Date:   Sun Jan 13 12:06:58 2013 -0500

    Broaden Proprietary Relicensing section to cover "copyleft trolling".
    
    The Proprietary Relicensing provision should also apply in
    circumstances where 'We' (perhaps including licensors downstream from
    the original licensor) offer to forgive past or future noncompliance
    with respect to a work 'We' do not distribute (e.g., what would be a
    downstream Derived Work but which is created by someone lateral to
    'you') through purchase of a proprietary license.
    
    There is some evidence that some purported GPL licensors are engaging
    in such behavior (rather than the more familiar case of announcing at
    the outset that proprietary licenses are available for the
    GPL-licensed work distributed by the licensor, or some enhanced
    the outset that proprietary licenses are available for the
    GPL-licensed work distributed by the licensor, or some enhanced
    version of it).


(It occurs to me that 'license' may not be a sufficient term.)

That said, I'm not sure 'offer to' is necessary to deal with this
scenario, or whether it might be addressable in some better way. But
that was the intention.

There's a new proprietary relicensing problem I just became aware of
that I'm not sure how to address, if at all, but I'll note that in a
different mailing list post.

 - RF



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