[Harmony-Drafting] copyleft outbound licensing

Tue Jun 28 17:38:30 UTC 2011

I am pretty much in favour of it. Clarity is always preferable, and
clearly FSF only recommends its own copyleft licenses, and by all means
cannot encourage -- nay, not discourage -- any strong copyleft which is
not the GNU GPL for the simple reason that it would implicitly be
incompatible with its own or consent to derogate from the provisions of
the same, let alone towards recessive licenses. This  is clear to all
experts in the field, but could be less obvious to the less literate
users of the document, so better be clear that "option 4" is for what it is.

Sorry for the slight deviation, I also wanted to set the record straight
as per the "GPL centrism" of the FSF*.

Cheers

Carlo

On 06/28/2011 05:00 PM, villalu at gtlaw.com wrote:
> And I should add that a GNU-copyleft-only option may be a valid option; there are certainly people in our community who wouldn't trust anyone else. But if that's what option 4 will be, it should be transparent about that and not say "GNU-recommended licenses" with the attendant implication that the list might include non-GNU licenses. 
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: harmony-drafting-bounces at lists.harmonyagreements.org 
>> [mailto:harmony-drafting-bounces at lists.harmonyagreements.org] 
>> On Behalf Of villalu at gtlaw.com
>> Sent: Tuesday, June 28, 2011 9:35 AM
>> To: patrice-emmanuel.schmitz at be.unisys.com; allison at lohutok.net
>> Cc: harmony-drafting at lists.harmonyagreements.org
>> Subject: Re: [Harmony-Drafting] copyleft outbound licensing
>>
>> I'd second that. If you're going to use their list, might as 
>> well just go ahead and say "GNU licenses." It would be the 
>> same list, but would be more transparent.
>>
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>>> From: harmony-drafting-bounces at lists.harmonyagreements.org
>>> [mailto:harmony-drafting-bounces at lists.harmonyagreements.org]
>>> On Behalf Of Schmitz, Patrice-Emmanuel
>>> Sent: Tuesday, June 28, 2011 8:26 AM
>>> To: Allison Randal
>>> Cc: harmony-drafting at lists.harmonyagreements.org
>>> Subject: Re: [Harmony-Drafting] copyleft outbound licensing
>>>
>>> A formal reference to the FSF list of "recommended licenses" 
>>> is not appropriate, and even less to the "FSF recommended copyleft 
>>> licenses", because in the FSF "GPL centric" mind, the GPL 
>> (read GPLv3 
>>> and AGPLv3) is the sole acceptable license. Therefore the 
>> list will be 
>>> (very) short: any time a copyleft enters in conflict with the GPL 
>>> copyleft, the license is not recommended (worse: you are 
>> "urged" not 
>>> to use it !) This is contradicted by the reality of license 
>>> proliferation. In fact they are several OSI approved 
>> copyleft licenses 
>>> (including the OSL, GPL, EUPL, Eclipse etc.) and it should 
>> not be too 
>>> difficult to make a subset.
>>> Patrice-Emmanuel Schmitz
>>> Legal expert, www.OSOR.eu
>>>
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: harmony-drafting-bounces at lists.harmonyagreements.org
>>> [mailto:harmony-drafting-bounces at lists.harmonyagreements.org]
>>> On Behalf Of Allison Randal
>>> Sent: Tuesday, June 28, 2011 3:18 PM
>>> To: harmony-drafting at lists.harmonyagreements.org
>>> Subject: Re: [Harmony-Drafting] copyleft outbound licensing
>>>
>>> One thing dropping Option Four doesn't cover is cultural 
>> affiliation 
>>> of various projects with FSF vs OSI. The FSF has graciously 
>> created a 
>>> page listing copyleft licenses that they recommend, which 
>> we can use 
>>> as the "FSF" option.
>>>
>>> http://www.gnu.org/licenses/recommended-copylefts.html
>>>
>>> So, with that, I'm suggesting this revised text for Option 
>> Four, with 
>>> the actual link given in the FAQ pages (so it's easy to 
>> update later 
>>> without updating the text of all the generated agreement documents 
>>> various projects are using):
>>>
>>> ------
>>> (Option Four) As a condition on the grant of rights in Sections 2.1 
>>> and 2.2, We agree to license the Contribution only under 
>> the terms of 
>>> the license or licenses which We are using on the 
>> Submission Date for 
>>> the Material or any licenses on the Free Software 
>> Foundation's list of 
>>> "Recommended copyleft licenses" on or after the Effective Date, 
>>> whether or not such licenses are subsequently disapproved 
>> (including 
>>> any right to adopt any future version of a license if permitted).
>>> ------
>>>
>>> Thoughts, comments?
>>>
>>> Allison
>>>
>>> On 06/23/2011 08:43 PM, Radcliffe, Mark wrote:
>>>> I think that this is fine too
>>>>
>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>> From: harmony-drafting-bounces at lists.harmonyagreements.org
>>>> [mailto:harmony-drafting-bounces at lists.harmonyagreements.org] On 
>>>> Behalf Of Walli Stephen
>>>> Sent: Thursday, June 23, 2011 3:53 AM
>>>> To: Allison Randal
>>>> Cc: harmony-drafting at lists.harmonyagreements.org
>>>> Subject: Re: [Harmony-Drafting] copyleft outbound licensing
>>>>
>>>> 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
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> Harmony-Drafting mailing list
>>>>> Harmony-Drafting at lists.harmonyagreements.org
>>>>>
>>> http://lists.harmonyagreements.org/mailman/listinfo/harmony-drafting
>>>> Stephen R. Walli, Technical Director, OuterCurve Foundation
>>>> website: http://www.outercurve.org
>>>> mailto:  swalli at outercurve.org
>>>> mobile:  +1 425 522 3409
>>>> skype:   stephen.walli
>>>> blog:    http://stephesblog.blogs.com  (Once More unto the Breach)
>>>> Linkdin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/stephenrwalli
>>>> Twitter: http://twitter.com/stephenrwalli
>>>>
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