[copyleft-next] dual-licensing ; license modding

Andrew Engelbrecht sudoman at ninthfloor.org
Wed Aug 20 19:29:47 UTC 2014


in order to dual-license software using your copyleft license and a
proprietary one, someone with copyright for all contributions might
simply remove the anti-dual-license clause in copyleft-next.

one might wish to deny the copyright holder permission to use a
derivative of the copyleft-next license, to use the copyleft-next name
for their license in order to prevent this. i'm not sure how i'd feel
about trademarking the name of a license under CC0. i think licensing
the license under CC0 is pretty cool.

as long as as copyleft requires a foundation of copyright and it isn't
directly expressed as set of optional laws, dual licensing may remain
hard to avoid. if copyleft were expressed as a set of laws, it's
unlikely that all jurisdictions would concurrently have the same or
similar laws.


i am concerned with the potential for a plethora of copyleft-next
variants which would be difficult to make sense of, keep track of, and
combine. one potential solution for this may be to include in the cl-n
license a request that any modifications and derivatives of the license
be included in a standard separate file, or apparent in some standard way.

asking coders to mention the non-vanilla status of a source code file's
license in its header would be very helpful.

welcoming quality upstream submissions might reduce the number of small
and not-so-small copyleft-next forks, not to discourage independent
changes, but because keeping track of many licenses is complicated.

an additional request could be for the license modder to choose an
alternative name for their license, such as "copyleft-next-deriv", or
the "i-like-beards license", or to clearly state somewhere near the top
that the license was changed inline.

-andrew

p.s. i talked with another in private regarding paragraphs 1 and 2 some
weeks ago.



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