[copyleft-next] Limited-term copyleft

Francois Marier francois at fmarier.org
Thu Feb 14 04:24:35 UTC 2013


On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 4:40 PM, Richard Fontana
<fontana at sharpeleven.org> wrote:
> Does anyone think the idea of a limited-term copyleft -- particularly
> given that copyleft-next is a software-oriented license -- is a
> good/bad idea?

I really like the idea. It's an elegant hack on the ever-increasing
copyright term. It would also put a bound on the amount of work
involved in relicensing old pieces of code with lots of unreachable
contributors.

> If anyone thinks it's a good idea, what would be a good copyleft
> duration? 15, 20, 25 years?

Are there examples of 20 year-old copyleft code that would be useful
today as it was published 20 years ago? In other words, in 5 years,
could someone fork the 1998 Linux kernel and do something that would
threaten the GPL project in any way?

Francois


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