[copyleft-next] copyleft-next 0.3.0 released

Kuno Woudt kuno at frob.nl
Tue May 21 01:55:29 UTC 2013


Hello,

On 17-05-13 23:24, Richard Fontana wrote:
> 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).

Oh, this is an exciting change.   Which seemingly makes the license
very suitable for things written in 
python/perl/ruby/javascript/haskell/etc...
and distributed as source code + machine readable dependency file.

Though I think that "a work that merely makes reference to My Work."
should never be a derivative and the option to "explicitly state an
expectation otherwise" can be removed from the license. But perhaps
there are use-cases I am not aware of where such a statement would
be desirable.

In a way the choice being made by the licensor is between strong
copyleft (GPL-like) and weaker copyleft (almost LGPL-like), with the
default being this modern implementation of the LGPL.


Still, even in it's current form it seems like a very interesting change.
Now we just need an affero variant and the license will be perfect for
web applications :)

-- kuno / warp.



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