[copyleft-next] Limited-term copyleft

Luis Villa luis at tieguy.org
Thu Feb 14 16:13:28 UTC 2013


On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 7:02 AM, Pamela Chestek <pchestek at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 9:39 AM, Theodore Ts'o <tytso at mit.edu> wrote:
>> On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 01:29:59AM -0500, Richard Fontana wrote:
>>> > Assuming you set a 30 year term, would it be ok for the
>>> > early parts of Linux to enter the public domain in 10 years?
>>>
>>> I was hoping Ted Ts'o might chime in. :)
>>
>> Because of the rapid pace of hardware change, it's highly unlikely
>> that Linux from ten years ago would be particularly interesting for
>> most people.  This might be less true of mature, more slowly moving
>> projects, that don't have hardware dependencies, such as GNU Emacs,
>> however.
>>
>> One nice thing about having a sunset clause like this is that it makes
>> it easier to relicense code, since you only need to try to
>> find/contact developers who have contributed to the project in the
>> last ten years.
>>
> FWIW (and my opinion is probably the least important), I have been
> convinced that it would be worthwhile to have term limit on the
> copyleft and have the license reverts to a permissive one after that.
> My main concern was with the uncertainty of an effort to commit to the
> public domain, but a permissive license instead would solve the
> problem. I also wondered whether you would undermine the copyleft goal
> but it sounds like not; that after an appropriate period of time it
> isn't that likely that the software would be commercially appealing.
> In return, there would be some benefit for the legacy users; in
> particular you've solved the relicensing problem at the outset (which
> it sounds like is a real, not hypothetical, issue) rather than having
> to find copyright owners many years later.

The relicensing issue is a bit of a clincher for me; I had not been
strongly leaning one way or the other but it seems like a real,
valuable win.

Luis


More information about the copyleft-next mailing list