[copyleft-next] Inbound-outbound clause and licensor promise

Richard Fontana fontana at sharpeleven.org
Sat Feb 23 19:15:20 UTC 2013


On Sat, Feb 23, 2013 at 06:17:38PM +0200, Engel Nyst wrote:
> Thank you for considering it and adding a contributions provision.
> If I understand correctly, the current version is still Apache-influenced,
> in this sense. (it states the default license)

Yes.
 
> I'd note a few small details on the current provision.
> "To the extent of Your copyright in Your Patch" seems to say that
> it applies only to original works (or to which "You" are copyright
> holder). I wonder if this is necessary, because "You" could also
> have the right from the author, to submit it freely under copyleft-next.

Ah, good point. I think it could be revised to cover that set of
cases.
 
> "If You distribute a work to Me specifically for inclusion in or
> modification of a Covered Work" - does this intend to say "If You
> distribute a work to Me specifically for inclusion in a Covered Work,
> including a modification of a Covered Work"? But it might be only me
> that finds the phrasing a bit odd.

As I think I noted I wrote this up rather quickly since I wanted it in
the 0.2.0 release, so I'm sure the phrasing can be improved.

One issue I was thinking about was that a 'Patch' might not be a
'Derived Work' (as currently defined). The problem here in part is
something I'd noted (at least to myself) much earlier, that there's no
obvious simple way to define what a 'project' is. A project might
consist of multiple separate and independent works from even a strong
copyleft perspective.
 
Not that the current phrasing you have pointed to necessarily
addresses that problem in a non-suboptimal way.

I think you may be saying that you can't conceive of any form of
'modification' that would not consist of 'inclusion' of the
'Patch'. That may be right.
 
> "You license it to Me under this license" seems to say that "You"
> license it "only to Myself". For example, if the contribution policy
> has public merge/pull requests, then this wording seems to say
> that "I" need to take action (i.e. accept it, sublicense it), before its
> license is granted to everyone. Which is counter-intuitive, I'd say,
> since the conditions under which the default license is granted are
> already fulfilled by the submission action.

I understand the point, and I think your concern would be addressed by
getting rid of 'to Me'. Since the "I-to-You" copyleft condition
doesn't say "I license *to You*" (it has the same nonspecificity that
all versions of the GPL have had -- the GPL having been specifically
conceived as a license 'to the general public'), there's no reason I
can see why this provision has to be nonsymmetrically specifically a
license from You to Me.

/me wonders if we are entering Martin Buber territory. :)

> OTOH, I'd add, it's interesting that if the 'Patch' would have been
> included in 'Derived Works', there wouldn't have been a special
> position of 'Me' (as far as I can tell), not on the point of guaranteeing
> to everyone licensing rights on contributor's code.

Right. One reason why I did it this way was that I wanted to have what
for lack of a better term I call the 'casual reader' to see that this
is a feature of the license, at the cost of some possible greater
elegance.

> > A possible problem with both solutions, and I think the thing that
> > ended up bothering me about simple reuse of the Apache language, is
> > that 'We' aren't necessarily equivalent to the upstream project.  But
> > maybe that isn't really a significant problem. No one seems to worry
> > about it in the case of the Apache License, and even the ASF appears
> > to rely on the existence of this clause to justify its non-use of a
> > CLA for certain classes of contributions.
> >
> 
> I'm not sure I understand the problem: if "We" develop a derivative under
> copyleft-next, then I'd expect 'Patches' to them to be under this default
> license. I'm not sure that is problematic, but I probably misunderstand
> the issue here.

The issue is, in real life, are You actually submitting Your Patch to
any of the "Me's" You're getting licenses from. Sometimes yes (maybe
usually yes). 

There could be value in having this provision in even if it is not
really possible to solve that problem. 

> Just a few notes, please note the IANAL obligatory disclaimer.

No need for any IANAL disclaimers in this project. This project is
premised on the basic principle that lawyers are at least as clueless
as non-lawyers when it comes to drafting FLOSS licenses. :)

- RF






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