[copyleft-next] Limited-term copyleft

Sam Kleinman sam at tychoish.com
Sun Feb 24 03:13:38 UTC 2013


On Wednesday, February 13 2013, 23:19:28, Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠) wrote:

> 15 years is a very long time. For example, bringing Linux 2.2 up to
> shape to be commercially usable today would require a massive amount of
> work. It's almost irrelevant for practical purposes what license Linux
> 2.2 is under.
>
> If this is meant to have any practical effect, I would suggest 10 years
> or even 5 years.

True, but VMWare bootstraps off of 2.4.x series kernels and those are
10-12 years old, and the Xenlinux for Xen dom0 patches hang off of old
2.6.18 kernels (circa 2006,) which I suspect are still *incredibly*
prevalent in actual deployments.

I'm not sure what the conclusion is: it's safe to say that there's a lot
of very widely deployed GPL'd software that's 5 or even 10 years
old. I'm not sure a sunset on the copyleft would have any real
deleterious effects.

(On the other hand, if a sunset provides incentives for third parties to
maintain old software longer than the original maintainer did; it might
discourage slow moving organizations from supporting/contributing to
current development efforts, which wouldn't be ideal. Also unlikely and
somewhat contrived.)

Cheers,
sam

--
Sam Kleinman (tychoish):
 - garen at tychoish.com
 - tychoish <http://tychoish.com/>
 "don't get it right, get it written" -- james thurber


More information about the copyleft-next mailing list