On Tue, May 21, 2013 at 07:18:16PM +0100, Gervase Markham wrote:
Which direction is "forward compatible"?
My understanding was that one of copyleft-next's founding principles was
that it was a GPL-style strong copyleft. (Am I right in that
understanding?) Allowing relicensing of c-n code under LGPL or MPL would
rather scupper that.
If you want to allow the relicensing of copyleft-next code to GPLv2 or
GPLv3, it needs to be more permissive than either one. This is what
allows BSD code to be relicensed under GPLv2/v3. If it is stronger
than GPLv2 or GPLv3, in that it has more restrictions than GPLv2 or v3
(for example, such as adding the Affero restriction) then that code
can be relicensed to either GPLv2 or GPLv3.
One of the other problems that has been noted before is that "weaker"
and "stronger" assumes that the copyright licenses can be strictly
ordered, and GPLv2-only and GPLv3-only are the perfect
counter-example. Code licensed under a GPLv2-only license (such as
the Linux Kernel) can not be suared with code licensed under a
GPLv3-only license (such as Samba). Code sharing doesn't work in
*either* direction.
- Ted