[copyleft-next] copyleft-next 0.3.0 released

Richard Fontana fontana at sharpeleven.org
Sat May 18 04:24:49 UTC 2013


On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 03:31:24PM +0200, Antoine Pitrou wrote:
 
> > The following are not Derived Works: (i) Mere Aggregation;
> >    (ii) a mere reproduction of My Work; and (iii) if My Work fails to
> >    explicitly state an expectation otherwise, a work that merely makes
> >    reference to My Work.
> 
> Why the conditional in (iii)? Do we want to allow the licensor to say "works
> mentioning this Covered Work are considered Derived Works"? Is there an use
> case I'm missing?

This is a significant and suboptimally drafted change. Ideas for how
to draft it better (without massively increasing the size of the text)
are welcome.

A number of considerations motivated this change, but an illustrative
one arose out of something I dealt with recently in $DAYJOB, an
upstream OpenStack issue noted here:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/cinder/+bug/1157091

Note in particular the statement "it's a bit odd to have an AGPL
dependency that really means cinder-rtstool is AGPL (even though it
says Apache2 in the header)". While this was one of those bad
facts/bad law situations, I was personally struck by how *wrong* this
conclusion felt to me (without regard to whether it was legally
correct [though I do not think it was] or not). And note the cosmetic
resolution of the bug.

The point of this change in copyleft-next is that, if, say, rtslib had
been under copyleft-next (and had escaped the nullification of
proprietary/copyleft dual licensing provision somehow [1]), then some
downstream noncopyleft (or proprietary) endeavor should not need to
worry about the mere use of an external library as in itself having a
copyleft effect on the immediate work in question -- unless the
licensor of the copyleft-next library says something explicit to make
clear that this is intended (in which case it still is not a foregone
conclusion that the dependency relationship gives rise to some
copyleft effect). 

 - RF


[1] To be more precise: The rtslib referred to here is actually
rtslib-fb, which is Andy Grover's fork of Rising Tide Systems'
rtslib. In a universe where RTS had used copyleft-next for rtslib,
rtslib-fb wouldn't have triggered the nullification provision, but
presumably rtslib proper would have.


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