On Sat, Jan 26, 2013 at 02:16:46PM -0500, Richard Fontana wrote:
Anyway, this goes to the policy question of what to do about
or-later.
I'm pretty sure we've already discussed this once (although I don't
think any conclusion has been reached), but it seems to me that the
question of "or-later" is inextricably bound up in who and by what
process gets to decide what is an official "next version" of the
copyleft-next license.
Consider for the sake of argument, what might happen if some very
important piece of code starts using the copyleft-next license, and
then whatever organization which is handed the responsibility of
maintaining the copyleft-next license releases a new version which
basically says, "new rules! copyleft-next-v2 == new BSD-style license"
I would assume a large number of poeple, including those people who
trusted their code to a copyright-next 1.0-or-later license, would be
upset if something like this were to come to pass.
BTW, I find it really interesting that for all the FSF was
super-paranoid about what might happen if they were lose control of
their assets, didn't try to take steps to protect against a
theoretical future where an insufficient of true beleivers continue
their FSF membership, and a large number of "new blood" members vote
in a new board which approves a GPLv4 which substantially changes the
meaning the GPL (either by reverting the GPLv3-style Anti-Tivoization
to the GPLv2 definition, or by making the GPLv4 == BSD).
Of course, I'm not sure what kind of protections you can really place
to prevent this sort of thing, other than not allowing later versions
in the first place.
Note that this particular class of problems is not an issue which with
the Apache or other more permissive free software licenses, since you
can't add new restrictions in an effective manner (people can simply
refuse to upgrade to the new version, such as what the Linux Kernel
developers have done via-a-vis GPLv3). You can only make the license
be more relaxed. Given that you can't really make the Apache license
any more relaxed (except maybe in the clauses relating defensive
patent retribution clauses).
- Ted