FOSDEM: Richard Fontana on copyleft-next

I'd really like to see the simplest possible license that provides approximately the same set of essential protections as the GPLv{2,3}; thus, I'd really like to see this license act as a strict subset of those licenses.

Of course I realize not everyone agrees with me. People disagree about
licensing policy; some prefer noncopyleft, some prefer strong
copyleft, some prefer weak copyleft. No issue with that; such
diversity is great.

But this is not a matter of selling proprietary licenses to fund open
source code, which strikes me either as a propagandistic or else a
quaint way of seeing it. Rather, it's the problem of abusing copyleft
specifically to sell proprietary licenses, with a number of specific
attendant problems, such as promoting FUD around copyleft.

> B) this is such a critical item that it's worth having many people
> not use the license, or convert from it to GPL so that they can then
> sell the proprietary licenses.

There's some evidence that these kinds of problematic business models
are in decline, so that supports the view that this may not be so
critical. But if having a provision that effectively nullifies
copyleft/proprietary dual-licensing tactics drives some people away
because they want to engage in such tactics, I call that
success. That's precisely the purpose of the provision: to drive those
people or businesses away, so that, however few or many developers use
copyleft-next, no one does so as a proprietary upsell gimmick. The
only problem is that the provision in its current form may not be as
clear as it could be in stating its objective.

> and if you can't make that conversion to GPL to bypass the
> restriction, then you are imposing an additional restriction to what
> the GPL includes and are not GPL compatible)

The license is explicitly outbound GPL-compatible. No GPL-incompatible
restrictions will survive licensing derived works under the GPL. But
no one should ever get to the point of having to convert to GPL to
bypass the provision in question. A business (or its legal advisor)
contemplating some copyleft-based open core scheme or the like will
take one look at copyleft-next and decide to use some other copyleft
license for such a purpose.

> So this is a provision that is controversial, and can be pretty
> trivially bypassed, why is it so valuable again?

I'm afraid I don't see the controversy. I see a (probably declining)
number of businesses using GPL/AGPL or other copyleft-based
dual-licensing/open core/proprietary upsell business models. I happen
to consider this cynical use of copyleft licensing to be a tremendous
ethical failure. I have mainly encountered negative views of such
business models from those who have sympathy for the core policy goals
of strong copyleft.

As for bypassing it, the point is to discourage any use of the license
for proprietary upsell purposes to begin with.