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).
- RF
[1] To be more precise: The rtslib referred to here is actually
rtslib-fb, which is Andy Grover's fork of Rising Tide Systems'
rtslib. In a universe where RTS had used copyleft-next for rtslib,
rtslib-fb wouldn't have triggered the nullification provision, but
presumably rtslib proper would have.