On 01/15/2013 11:02 AM, Luis Villa wrote:
Will the talk explain the purpose of c-l? :)
Yes (though one response to the "What is the purpose" question is "why
does there have to be a purpose?").
It has been a very
interesting and educational drafting exercise, so I'm glad to have
participated here and will continue to do so,
Thank you!
but I'm still unclear on
what the long-term goal is. (Or perhaps to frame the question
differently: what practical role in the licensing ecosystem does it
fill that other licenses do not?)
A fair question or set of questions, which I haven't addressed too
explicitly I suppose.
In a couple of talks I gave in 2012, I speculated that the GNU GPL
license family might (as some have asserted is the case, citing or
using data that admittedly has been questioned) be suffering
competitive disadvantage relative to other licenses, principally
popular noncopyleft licenses. I suggested that one set of reasons for
this might be a suboptimal and unnecessary degree of general
complexity and aesthetic baroqueness, associated particularly (other
than as to LGPL, I suppose), though not exclusively, with the v3
license set. If this is true, and I don't know whether it is, I assert
that it implies that the degree of strong copyleft licensing,
particularly for newer free software projects, is lower than it
*ought* to be, as there are no viable alternatives to the GNU GPL
family for developers otherwise potentially favorable towards strong
copyleft policy.
As a related point, I believe there is some continued commercial
resistance to the GNU GPL license family (more so the v3 licenses than
GPLv2, no doubt) and I believe this has some effect on upstream
license use by projects that are not commercial as such, which goes
beyond what one would expect if the only characteristic distinguishing
copyleft from non-copyleft licenses were the minimum differential
legal language necessary to implement the different legal policies of
such licenses. I have encountered anecdotal evidence suggesting this
is so. While the FSF has stated that widespread adoption, including
commercial use, of the GNU GPL license family is not its goal, my own
view is that strong copyleft licensing should reach a socially optimal
level relative to weak copyleft and noncopyleft licensing (though
admittedly I have no idea what that level is), and *unnecessary*
barriers to strong copyleft license adoption are undesirable.
As a further related point, I have come to realize that the GNU GPL
license family is subjected to stricter scrutiny than other
widely-used FLOSS licenses, more for historical, social and political
reasons than because of the objective merit of such licenses. To put
it more simply, the GNU GPL license family carries a lot of 'baggage'
and in some respects you could say the GNU GPL license family has been
the victim of its own great success. It is possible that the only
long-term way out of that is to start over from scratch and in a
manner partially or wholly external to the FSF, which is essentially
what copyleft-next has done (although the 'starting over from scratch'
was not foreseeable at the outset).
So if you imagine either (a) copyleft-next being used by actual
software projects, or (b) copyleft-next at least influencing future
license drafting efforts by others (especially on the copyleft side,
and above all on the GNU license family side), a speculative goal is
that a structurally and aesthetically different license with
approximately the same policy objective as GPLv2 will help correct
what I believe may be a kind of market error, which is essentially
this: that non-substantive characteristics of the GNU GPL are
frustrating the policy objectives of the GNU GPL by having some
inhibitive effect on license adoption and use.
That's one long-winded partial answer to the "goal" question. There
are other goals, and other goals may yet emerge. At least one goal is
personal (my personal feeling, which I can't shake, that GPLv3 is
"unfinished", which I do not expect anyone else in the world to
share). As I indicated above, though, I am not sure there has to be a
goal in the sense you may mean. There are a few things that
copyleft-next does that the GNU GPL licenses do not do (particularly
the disincentives it creates for copyleft abuse by dual-licensing
vendors and the like), and many things the GNU GPL (especially GPLv3)
attempts to do that copyleft-next, at least in current form,
deliberately does not try to do.
It doesn't quite answer your different question about "practical
role", though I guess it implies an answer. If I thought GPLv2 and
GPLv3 (and AGPLv3) were (a) perfect in some objective sense, or
perfect apart from the special prerogative of their license steward to
decide in the future that imperfections exist justifying license
revisions, or (b) regarded as perfect by the "correct" amount of
persons with a subjective view, I would see no particular purpose to
copyleft-next other than as a purely artistic or scholarly exercise.
I suppose I should add something, which is that I have encountered
from a few people the sense that there is something per se improper
about copyleft-next because (as far as I can tell, this is the
sentiment), if taken seriously, it is an effort to "change the way
things are". This is a disturbingly conservative or reactionary view
and if copyleft-next can do anything, however small, to challenge this
sentiment I think it is worthwhile for that reason alone.
- RF