Re: [copyleft-next] copyleft-next 0.1.0 released
On Mon, Jan 28, 2013 at 02:58:16PM +1100, Francois Marier wrote:
In the context of a program licensed under "GPLv3 or
later", I remember
someone asking RMS that question during one of his public talks.
Unfortunately, I can no longer find a reference to his exact answer but my
recollection of it is that Section 14 covers that:
"Such new versions will be similar in spirit to the present version"
A non-copyleft GPLv4 would not be similar in spirit and so the "upgrade
clause" would no longer apply.
Of course, this begs the question who gets to decide whether a new
verison is similar in spirit or not. I suppose it's possible that a
judge and/or a jury would rule that way. I'm not sure I would count
on that, though.
Does the fact that the GPLv3 add things like the anti-Tivoization
clause make it sufficiently different? Certainly the Linux kernel
development community thought the anti-Tivo clause made enough of a
significant difference that they rejected the license.
Trying to steer this back to the copyleft-next topic, it seems to me
until questions around how newer versions will be drafted and
officially blessed, and some kind of definition of what principles
would be used when creating a new version, I could imagine many
developers perhaps thinking twice about whether they would be willing
to use a "or later version" clause.
Speaking more generally, what makes the copyleft-next uniquely
"itself" in terms of how could we tell whether the next version is
similar in spirit to the current version? If the 2.0 version of
copyleft-next increases its word count by 90% (which is the percentage
increase from the GPLv2 at 2968 words to the GPLv3 weighing in at
5644), would it still have the same spirit? :-)
Regards,
- Ted