[copyleft-next] comments on 0.1.1

Pamela Chestek pchestek at gmail.com
Sat Feb 9 16:59:29 UTC 2013


On Sat, Feb 9, 2013 at 11:45 AM, Richard Fontana
<fontana at sharpeleven.org> wrote:
> 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.
>
In that scenario, I think my suggestion makes you worse off. And my
scenario is already somewhat attenuated because I had to imply a
meaning into "offer" (i.e., "initial offer") for it to be a problem.
So I would leave "offer to" in.

Pam


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