On Tue, Jul 19, 2016 at 03:38:51PM -0700, Greg KH wrote:
On Mon, Jul 18, 2016 at 12:56:33PM +0930, Rusty Russell wrote:
Greg KH gregkh@linuxfoundation.org writes:
On Thu, Jun 30, 2016 at 03:53:27PM -0700, Luis R. Rodriguez wrote:
copyleft-next [0] [1] is an openly evolved copyleft license, its an effort to evolve copyleft without participation of the Church (TM) or State (R), completley openly to the extend development and discussion of copyleft-next by participants of the copyleft-next project are governed by the Harvey Birdman Rule [2].
Even though it has been a goal of the project to be GPL-v2 compatible to be certain I've asked for a clarification about what makes copyleft-next GPLv2 compatible and also asked for a summary of benefits. This prompted some small minor changes to make compatiblity even further clear and as of copyleft 0.3.1 compatibility should be crystal clear [3].
The summary of why copyleft-next 0.3.1 is compatible with GPLv2 is explained as follows:
Like GPLv2, copyleft-next requires distribution of derivative works ("Derived Works" in copyleft-next 0.3.x) to be under the same license. Ordinarily this would make the two licenses incompatible. However, copyleft-next 0.3.1 says: "If the Derived Work includes material licensed under the GPL, You may instead license the Derived Work under the GPL." "GPL" is defined to include GPLv2.
In practice this means copyleft-next code in Linux may be licensed under the GPL2, however there are additional obvious gains for bringing contributins from Linux outbound where copyleft-next is preferred. To help review further I've also independently reviewed compatiblity with attorneys at SUSE and they agree with the compatibility.
A summary of benefits of copyleft-next >= 0.3.1 over GPLv2 is listed below, it shows *why* some folks like myself will prefer it over GPLv2 for future work.
o It is much shorter and simpler o It has an explicit patent license grant, unlike GPLv2 o Its notice preservation conditions are clearer o More free software/open source licenses are compatible with it (via section 4) o The source code requirement triggered by binary distribution is much simpler in a procedural sense o Recipients potentially have a contract claim against distributors who are noncompliant with the source code requirement o There is a built-in inbound=outbound policy for upstream contributions (cf. Apache License 2.0 section 5) o There are disincentives to engage in the controversial practice of copyleft/ proprietary dual-licensing o In 15 years copyleft expires, which can be advantageous for legacy code o There are explicit disincentives to bringing patent infringement claims accusing the licensed work of infringement (see 10b) o There is a cure period for licensees who are not compliant with the license (there is no cure opportunity in GPLv2) o copyleft-next has a 'built-in or-later' provision
[0] https://github.com/copyleft-next/copyleft-next [1] https://lists.fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/copyleft-next/ [2] https://github.com/richardfontana/hbr/blob/master/HBR.md [3] https://lists.fedorahosted.org/archives/list/copyleft-next@lists.fedorahoste...
v2:
o extend checkpatch.pl with copyleft-next as well for MODULE_LICENSE() check - as suggested by Paul Bolle.
Cc: copyleft-next@lists.fedorahosted.org Cc: Richard Fontana fontana@sharpeleven.org Signed-off-by: Ciaran Farrell Ciaran.Farrell@suse.com Signed-off-by: Christopher De Nicolo Christopher.DeNicolo@suse.com Signed-off-by: Luis R. Rodriguez mcgrof@kernel.org
Acked-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman gregkh@linuxfoundation.org
Adding a license here implies we accept that it's actually GPLv2 compatible. And IANAL.
Note, at least lawyer has signed off on this.
Clarification: *2 lawyers* at SUSE had Signed-off on this already.
I'd like to see Richard do so as well.
With Richard that's 3 attorneys now.
I'll proceed to submit some code with this license as you request, Rusty. Its however not for modules yet so I would not make use of the MODULE_LICENSE("copyleft-next") tag yet, however the license will be on top of a header.
Luis