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

FOSDEM: Richard Fontana on copyleft-next

Posted Feb 15, 2013 3:57 UTC (Fri) by rfontana (subscriber, #52677)
In reply to: FOSDEM: Richard Fontana on copyleft-next by dlang
Parent article: FOSDEM: Richard Fontana on copyleft-next

> you either thing that A) everyone agrees with you on this topic
> (hint, not everyone does, a lot of people are Ok with the idea of a
> project selling proprietary licences if it funds the opensource
> code)

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.

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FOSDEM: Richard Fontana on copyleft-next

Posted Feb 15, 2013 5:05 UTC (Fri) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]

I think I might understand your concern now. If you mean dual-licensing business models that follow the poorly named "open core" model and sell an extended proprietary version, then I agree with you; that seems just as problematic as selling proprietary software in the first place. On the other hand, I don't see anything wrong with selling permissively licensed versions of the same code as a revenue model.

I'd still rather see this as an optional addition to the license, though, rather than a required provision.

FOSDEM: Richard Fontana on copyleft-next

Posted Feb 15, 2013 21:19 UTC (Fri) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]

To sell permissively licensed versions of the same code require you to be the sole copyright holder. So either you require copyright assignment or you refuse all external contributions, both alternatives being antisocial.

FOSDEM: Richard Fontana on copyleft-next

Posted Feb 17, 2013 12:31 UTC (Sun) by jrn (subscriber, #64214) [Link]

Or that you get a license agreement from contributors explicitly allowing you to sell permissively licensed versions of the same code.

The Chromium CLA does that, for example:
http://code.google.com/legal/individual-cla-v1.0.html

FOSDEM: Richard Fontana on copyleft-next

Posted Feb 15, 2013 5:10 UTC (Fri) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

> 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.

The problem is how to you block the bad behaviour (which as you note is not especially popular to start with) without blocking the acceptable versions.

your 'Anti-MySQL' clause isn't any better than the FSF's 'Anti-Tivo' clause. both are reactions to fairly rare abuse cases, and both are divisive in that there are large numbers of people in the community who don't see the behaviour as being so wrong that it's worth complicating a licence (and loosing all the non-abusive variations of the behaviour) to block the abusive behaviour.

> 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.

that assumes that that approach is in their minds at the start of the project. It may be something that's first discussed years into the project (when it gets big enough and functional enough for people to be interested in paying for it)

It's very common for projects to start and grow, and then hit a crisis where the work to maintain them is large enough to need the core people paid to do the work, but not have a funding source in place to do this. It's times like this that the 'run it through the GPL to strip this clause' would happen.

FOSDEM: Richard Fontana on copyleft-next

Posted Feb 21, 2013 10:41 UTC (Thu) by Otus (guest, #67685) [Link]

> 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.

Suppose project A decides they are OK with the provision preventing an open core model and decide to use copyleft-next (CN) for their license. What's to stop them from rethinking later, changing the project license to GPL and developing a proprietary version with the open core model?

Yes, the lack of copyright for parts of the code would do that unless they require copyright assignment or a more permissive contributor license, but how is that any different from the situation of CN without the provision?

IOW, I don't see how the provision adds any restrictions on use of the code or project format. It just means if some project does eventually decide to go open core, their further contributions will no longer be compatible with other CN projects, only GPL ones. That seems to hurt only those who use CN "in good faith" as their license.

FOSDEM: Richard Fontana on copyleft-next

Posted Feb 21, 2013 14:39 UTC (Thu) by rfontana (subscriber, #52677) [Link]

> IOW, I don't see how the provision adds any restrictions on use of
> the code or project format.

That's right; it doesn't. It is meant to be a strong disincentive to
use copyleft-next for copyleft/proprietary dual-licensing (by
nullifying its whole basis, which is monopolization of the
proprietization right), and to confine such conduct to other licenses.

> It just means if some project does eventually decide to go open
> core, their further contributions will no longer be compatible with
> other CN projects, only GPL ones. That seems to hurt only those who
> use CN "in good faith" as their license.

That's an interesting argument. The effect of this provision would
(let us assume) be to drive such a project (or to be more precise, the
business or entrepreneur behind it) to other licenses, these days most
likely the GPL or AGPL. So you're arguing that this is just a loss for
a copyleft-next code commons because it will be deprived of some
ability to use this open core code that might otherwise be under
copyleft-next.

First, such open core code will remain available for use by
copyleft-next projects provided it is a 'Separate Work' (outside the
scope of copyleft).

Second, assuming the open core project uses GPLv2/GPLv3/AGPLv3, such
open core code will be usable *inside the scope* of copyleft-next
works, with the theoretical effect being that the larger work will be
under GPLv2 or GPLv3 or some mixture of GPLv3/AGPLv3. This need not
have the effect of taking the *copyleft-next* code out of the
copyleft-next commons, so it doesn't seem like a huge loss. After all,
this nature of code combination occurs precisely because copyleft-next
is designed to be outbound-compatible with the GPL.

So I think your argument reduces to the argument that this provision
would have the effect of keeping the universe of copyleft-next
projects smaller. To me, this is *possible*, but it seems unlikely to
be meaningful unless copyleft-next becomes significantly popular
(which would be great but admittedly is not the case at the moment
:). And if it did become popular, I would see it as all the more
important to have this provision in, to prevent the 'gaming' of
copyleft-next that we've seen with other copyleft licenses.

In short, I'd rather have the copyleft-next universe be smaller and
limited to 'good-faith' projects, with the problematic conduct
confined to existing copyleft licenses like GPL/AGPL, than have the
copyleft-next universe be larger.