FOSDEM: Richard Fontana on copyleft-next [LWN.net]

FOSDEM: Richard Fontana on copyleft-next

Posted Feb 14, 2013 13:41 UTC (Thu) by zack (subscriber, #7062)
Parent article: FOSDEM: Richard Fontana on copyleft-next

> In order to show the drastic reduction in complexity, Fontana compared
> the word and line counts of several popular open source licenses.
> The word counts were as follows:

as a data point:

$ wc -w /usr/share/common-licenses/BSD # this is 3-clause BSD
225 /usr/share/common-licenses/BSD

Arguably, BSD-3 doesn't "do" much either, and I guess the most interesting comparison points for Richard are the most recent licenses (MPL 2.0, GPLv3).

But if the goal really is comparison with *popular* open source licenses, well, excluding BSD sounds like cheating :-) </troll>

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FOSDEM: Richard Fontana on copyleft-next

Posted Feb 14, 2013 14:05 UTC (Thu) by rfontana (subscriber, #52677) [Link]

> But if the goal really is comparison with *popular* open source licenses, well, excluding BSD sounds like cheating :-) </troll>

It wasn't actually meant to be a comparison to popular open source licenses. Clearly GPLv1 is not popular as a specifically chosen license, and MPL 2.0 is (AFAICT) not used much outside of the Mozilla ecosystem and LibreOffice. I picked GPLv1 to show the historical evolution in length of the GPL, and I picked MPL 2.0 because it's the most interesting case of a post-*GPLv3, pre-copyleft-next (weak) copyleft FLOSS license.

I have easily concluded that you can't make an effective, modern copyleft license much shorter than the Apache License 2.0, hence I didn't bother to compare to the popular minimalist pre-modern BSD and MIT variants.