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

FOSDEM: Richard Fontana on copyleft-next

Posted Feb 14, 2013 17:27 UTC (Thu) by dashesy (subscriber, #74652)
In reply to: FOSDEM: Richard Fontana on copyleft-next by rfontana
Parent article: FOSDEM: Richard Fontana on copyleft-next

Sorry for my ignorance, IANAL but it seems in this business everyone needs to self-educate on the subject.

So in a sense it is better to have one noncopyleft(free-to-all) license, than a copyleft+noncopyleft(free-to-all) dual license. I guess some of the potential use-cases for dual licensing can be achieved by LGPL, where the code improvements are integrated for all, but commercial entities need to also avoid static linkage (discrimination against the commercial usage). Also noncopyleft(free-to-all) means every user needs to get the software license separately, yes it is a simple request (but no request is too simple IMO), and it cannot be as easily bundled with other copyleft software. I guess part of the copyleft beauty is the ease to give software to others, and not just using it.

Another use-case (which is actually what I had in mind originally) is to have the noncopyleft license available to commercial entities but only for the final official binaries, at the same time have the source available under copyleft, with the hope that they return back the improvements to be incorporated in the future binaries for them.

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FOSDEM: Richard Fontana on copyleft-next

Posted Feb 14, 2013 18:23 UTC (Thu) by rfontana (subscriber, #52677) [Link]

> So in a sense it is better to have one noncopyleft(free-to-all) license, than a copyleft+noncopyleft(free-to-all) dual license.

I don't see any point to a copyleft/noncopyleft dual license except in some odd case of perceived or actual license incompatibility.

> Also noncopyleft(free-to-all) means every user needs to get the software license separately,

I don't understand this point. A (typical) feature of both copyleft and noncopyleft FLOSS licenses is that you get the license without any particular ceremonial overhead (this is also true of many proprietary licenses).

> Another use-case (which is actually what I had in mind originally) is to have the noncopyleft license available to commercial entities but only for the final official binaries, at the same time have the source available under copyleft, with the hope that they return back the improvements to be incorporated in the future binaries for them.

Ah, if I understand you correctly that is a whole nother issue, and one I've been thinking about recently. Some weak copyleft licenses explicitly allow non-FLOSS licensing of binaries by licensees, but the source code can only be distributed under the copyleft license.