[copyleft-next] An interesting take on license compatibility

Richard Fontana fontana at sharpeleven.org
Wed May 22 05:17:35 UTC 2013


On Tue, May 21, 2013 at 02:04:14PM -0400, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> On Tue, May 21, 2013 at 05:54:44PM +0200, Antoine Pitrou wrote:
> > 
> > IMHO, copyleft-next should be forward-compatible, not only with GPLv2
> > and GPLv3, but also LGPL and perhaps MPL.
> 
> Is copyleft-next forward compatible at this point?  I didn't think it
> was at the moment, but it's been a while since I've done a close look
> at the terms, and of course, I'm not a lawyer.  :-) At the very least
> I'd be surprised if copyleft-next was forward compatible with LGPL at
> the moment.
> 
> If it's not, how far away are we from it being forward compatible, and
> what would the tradeoffs be?

As of 0.3.0 it is (ignoring the situations Gerv was talking about)
forward-compatible with any version of the GPL (or the GNU AGPL).

It is not intended to be forward compatible with LGPL, but it is
arguably laterally compatible with LGPL, depending on how you
interpret LGPL. It is also in a sense compatible with LGPL to the
extent that LGPL is forward compatible with GPL (i.e. at the very
least copyleft-next and LGPL can be forward compatible together).

 - RF


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