Copyleft reference implementation [LWN.net]

Copyleft reference implementation

Posted May 17, 2008 0:33 UTC (Sat) by rgmoore (subscriber, #75)
In reply to: The Digital Standards Organization - The Hague Declaration by pieterh
Parent article: The Digital Standards Organization - The Hague Declaration

The reason for preferring copyleft reference implementations is not to favor a particular software development model but rather to protect the standard from capture by silent extension. It is harder for vendors to take a reference implementation, modify it to break compatibility with competitors' products and then package it as closed source.

I think that you're missing the point. It's only harder for them to break compatibility if they choose to use the copyleft licensed reference implementation. If they re-implement the standard rather than using the reference version, they're still free to extend it without sharing their work. And proprietary vendors will want to do exactly that because they want to avoid possible license conflicts with the rest of their software. All that making a copylefted reference implementation will accomplish is to make life miserable for any Free Software implementation that uses an incompatible license.

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Copyleft reference implementation

Posted May 17, 2008 5:42 UTC (Sat) by cannedfish (guest, #49561) [Link]

LGPL is copyleft too.

Copyleft reference implementation

Posted May 17, 2008 22:06 UTC (Sat) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]

With LGPL: If you change the implementation (and distribute it) you have to distribute the
modified implementation as well.

Copyleft reference implementation

Posted May 18, 2008 10:58 UTC (Sun) by cannedfish (guest, #49561) [Link]

Correct. I was commenting on said issue of license incompatibilities with free software
though...

Copyleft reference implementation

Posted May 19, 2008 6:48 UTC (Mon) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

It also have the flip side of limiting licensing diversification, which is a bad thing on most
counts.

The GPL/LGPL, by the sake of being the first (or the first that mattered) and the most popular
copyleft license then that means that end users expect compatibility with it. This creates a
ad-hoc standard... as long as everything stays compatible with the GPL then that means the GPL
is always going to be the 'least free' of the popular free software licenses.

I work in a place were I have to go through authorization to include all software in the end
product. If a distribution had a dozens of semi-incompatible licenses it would be a nearly
impossible task to get the approval to use Linux. Maybe right now it would be 'ok', but the
way things are heading it's only getting worse, more expensive, and more difficult. (yeah!
government! (that's sarcasm)) The legal overhead would be more expensive then just purchasing
some proprietary product from a different vendor.

Believe me, the only people that care about having different sorts of licenses are developers.
Nobody else cares... well that's not accurate.. everybody else cares (although they'd rather
NOT care) and they simply don't want to deal with it. GPL is bad enough, we don't need more of
the same.

Don't get me wrong. I think the GPL is the key to making free software a competitive system in
today's climate (and thus is wonderful).. but having another copyleft license that is not
compatible with GPL is only going to hurt except for maybe very specific cases. In other words
GPL is a necessary evil and that sort of thing should be kept to a minimum.