[copyleft-next] copyleft-next 0.2.0 released

Gervase Markham gerv at mozilla.org
Wed Feb 20 13:35:44 UTC 2013


I am late to this discussion, so my apologies if some of these points
have been raised before.

On 20/02/13 03:16, Richard Fontana wrote:
> Good news, everyone! 
> copyleft-next 0.2.0 has been released!
> 
> https://gitorious.org/copyleft-next/copyleft-next/blobs/raw/master/Releases/copyleft-next-0.2.0

* "This License does not exclude or limit any rights You have under
applicable law."

Some licensing documents disclaim e.g. the application of the United
Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods. Do
they have good reason to do so, and we are _sure_ there are no rights of
this sort we want to limit?

* "in a manner that fails to satisfy the Open Source Definition
published by the Open Source Initiative as of 1 January 2013"

Who decides? That sounds like a recipe for lawyer argument. Is it better
to refer to the OSI license list as of a certain date instead?

* "under the Apache License"

Perhaps you should give a version number. (Ah, I see you give one in the
definitions - but I don't think people will obviously read "Apache
License" as a defined term, because it normally has initial caps anyway.)

* "or "powered by" statements"

Is this too specific, or are we hoping a judge would understand this as
referring to a class of statements? E.g. if there was a "FooBar Inside"
statement instead of "Powered by FooBar"...

* "This condition may not be avoided through such means as separate
distribution of portions of the Derived Work."

Is it considered that there is no need for a system library exception?
Is that because the definition of Derived Work does not cover system
libraries?

* "under any version of the GNU General Public License"

I look forward to the rationale for this change; I would worry that this
would open the license up to the exploitation of flaws in e.g. GPLv1.

I presume that the intent is that the GPL's pass-through can be used to
get to AGPL licensing.

* "15 years"

Is that a conservative opening bid? :-) I would say 10. 5 years is a bit
short - the 5-years-old Linux kernel is still a pretty good bit of kit.
But 15 years is a long period over which to track down contributors to
get permission for some change.

* Has consideration been given to combining how section 2 works with how
section 8 works?

Gerv


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