[copyleft-next] HBR cure 2013-02-18

Pamela Chestek pchestek at gmail.com
Tue Feb 19 00:48:16 UTC 2013


On Mon, Feb 18, 2013 at 2:21 PM, Richard Fontana
<fontana at sharpeleven.org> wrote:
>> On Mon, Feb 18, 2013 at 01:21:16PM -0500, Pamela Chestek wrote:

> As a related aside, whether commercial vendor (or user, especially in
> the case of AGPL-like licenses) sentiment towards FLOSS licenses has
> any material impact in their uptake is an unanswered question. A key
> assumption made by the FSF in the way it handled its quasi-public
> drafting process for GPLv3 (2006-2007) was that in some way this was
> so (even though the official view of the FSF remains that 'popularity'
> of their licenses is a non-goal). I see no post-2007 evidence to
> justify this view one way or another. I could elaborate on that though
> it might get a bit off-topic.

An interesting question and I will continue to pursue it, as off-topic
as it might be. I always thought of Red Hat an accidental advocate of
GPL. That is, it built a business around this hot new thing Linux, and
Linux happened to be GPL, so it had no choice but to cope with it. My
decidedly anecdotal observation is that it's generally really hard for
a company (and people, for that matter) to truly cede control if they
can find any way to avoid it. Who are the successful companies who use
a true open source, copyleft model (not open core, not dual-licensed)
and also own most of the code? So your observation sounds right to me.

>
>> That said, I suspect that anyone
>> who isn't sophisticated about copyleft (which is most everyone)
>> believes that this is already a feature of the GPL licenses. In other
>> words, the great fear of GPL is that it will "infect" your proprietary
>> code and you will be forced to release the source code.  (Correct me
>> if I've misunderstood; I think this provision will have that effect.)
>
> It is not intended to have that effect, because the license in general
> is not intended to have that effect. (If anything I would like to
> somehow make copyleft-next strong copyleft while making clearer that
> this does not somehow equate to mass 'infection' of a larger
> proprietary code base, though I am not quite sure how to do this.) It
> is, however, intended to increase the (perceived) likelihood of
> enforcement.

I misspoke a bit - the perception is about what the penalty is if
there has been an inadvertent "infection," not that the license itself
causes the infection per se. But from my experience in the proprietary
world (which was Progress Software, which may be part of the reason
too), it's the accidental infection they're worried about, not the
deliberate creation of a derivative work. And the reason it is
accidental is because it's so bloody unclear when you've created a
derivative work.

So I guess what this means is, if you want to avoid the "infection"
concern, but want strong copyleft, then you need to be very crisp and
perhaps less expansive about what a "Derived Work" is. But then we're
back to trying to appease an audience that probably isn't going to
adopt copyleft in the first place anyway.

Pam


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