[copyleft-next] copyleft-next 0.3.0 released

Gervase Markham gerv at mozilla.org
Mon May 20 14:38:41 UTC 2013


On 19/05/13 05:02, Richard Fontana wrote:
> * In an important change, all licenses that are both OSI-approved and
>   classified by the FSF as 'free' (as of the release date) are deemed
>   inbound-compatible with copyleft-next,

The FSF license list <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html>
does not guarantee completeness:

"We try to list the most commonly encountered free software license on
this page, but cannot list them all"

The OSI list, on the other hand, is complete in the sense that it's a
list of all the licenses which have successfully completed the OSI process.

Is that a problem in practice?

>   provided that distribution of
>   a Covered Work incorporating code from the non-copyleft-next license
>   does not violate the latter license. I wonder whether this should go
>   even further, but this certainly expands the set of licenses that
>   are copyleft-next-compatible beyond those that are
>   GPL-compatible. For example, and connecting this to a thread from
>   several months ago, I would now assume that EPL code is
>   copyleft-next-compatible, whereas EPL remains GPL-incompatible under
>   orthodox doctrine.

If you have _outbound_ GPL compatibility, which you do, doesn't this
raise a bit of a problem?

I take some code under the EPL and put it in a copyleft-next project.
Someone else takes my project and "converts" to GPL. However, they can't
do that because of the EPL code originally included. So they need to be
warned that they can't do that, even though the license says they can.

Is this a problem? I think it is...

Gerv


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