[Harmony-Drafting] copyleft outbound licensing

[Walli Stephen]

FWIW I like this as an approach.  I think it covers any real world situations I can remember.  stephe

On 2011-06-22, at 6:30 PM , Allison Randal wrote:

> Mentioned in the meeting minutes, carried on here for further discussion.
> 
> We've talked a lot about how to handle copyleft licenses in the outbound
> license section. All the current options include copyleft licenses, but
> the discussion has ranged over whether we can draft an option that
> covers all copyleft licenses and only copyleft licenses. We added Option
> Four as an attempt at that, but later discovered that the FSF also
> recommends permissive licenses. One proposal was an option for "any
> copyleft license", with a suggestion that copyleft is well enough
> understood to need no definition. But, the following discussion
> indicated that there were many different understandings of what copyleft
> means, and that how to define copyleft in a sufficiently
> broad-but-narrow and future-proof fashion is less than obvious.
> 
> I had a conversation with Bradley Kuhn this week, where he pointed out
> that generically defining copyleft licenses isn't useful, because for
> the copyleft philosophy there's a huge difference between GPL, LGPL and
> AGPL, and projects make very intentional choices on those distinctions.
> 
> My proposal, based on Bradley's comments, is that we drop Option Four,
> and in our usage guide explain that the best way to capture "only
> copyleft licenses" is Option Two with an explicit list of the copyleft
> licenses the project supports.
> 
> Comments?
> 
> Allison
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Stephen R. Walli, Technical Director, OuterCurve Foundation
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