The kernel community confronts GPL enforcement

Posted Sep 5, 2016 12:39 UTC (Mon) by paulj (subscriber, #341)
In reply to: The kernel community confronts GPL enforcement by pabs
Parent article: The kernel community confronts GPL enforcement

Interesting, but some questionable clauses in there. Particularly the automatic sunsetting of copyleft after 15 years.

The kernel community confronts GPL enforcement

Posted Sep 6, 2016 7:32 UTC (Tue) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] (7 responses)

I suspect that is a clause that aims to kill off the "copyright is however damn long Disney wants it to be" problem within the small space of FLOSS.

The kernel community confronts GPL enforcement

Posted Sep 6, 2016 7:44 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (5 responses)

The problem is, so long as copyright generally doesn't have an (effective) sunset clause, then putting in one a copyleft licence would put copyleft sofware at a disadvantage to the rest. If I copyleft something, I want it to stay copylefted so long as other software stays copyrighted under their terms. Imagine if Linux code became permissive after 15 years?

I would never put my code under a licence with such a clause. Either permissive is the correct choice or copyleft is, and I'd pick that from the start.

The kernel community confronts GPL enforcement

Posted Sep 6, 2016 8:06 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

What are you going to do with 15-year old Linux? It'll be pretty much useless these days without much hardware support (back then 2.4 kernel has not even been released!). And if your project has not improved significantly in 15 years then it probably makes no harm to relicense it permissively.

I kinda like that idea, and 15 years is a good enough interval.

The kernel community confronts GPL enforcement

Posted Sep 6, 2016 17:28 UTC (Tue) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

> What are you going to do with 15-year old Linux?
Well, assuming my ISP-supplied DSL router isn't replaced with a differently awful piece of hardware within the next 5 years...

The kernel community confronts GPL enforcement

Posted Sep 6, 2016 8:35 UTC (Tue) by seyman (subscriber, #1172) [Link] (2 responses)

> The problem is, so long as copyright generally doesn't have an (effective) sunset clause, then putting in one a copyleft licence would put copyleft sofware at a disadvantage to the rest.

I'm not sure what "the rest" refers to in the above sentence but I've always viewed copyleft as giving rights to people that copyright normally denies them. Putting software in the public domain early just goes one step further.

> Imagine if Linux code became permissive after 15 years?

The Linux code becoming permissive today would be early 2.4.x (2.4.0 was released in january 2001). It doesn't do much compared to a modern kernel, it would probably not compile with modern C compilers and would contain security holes whose fix are not under a permissive license. I don't see much of a problem.

The kernel community confronts GPL enforcement

Posted Sep 6, 2016 9:46 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (1 responses)

Linux 2.2 and 2.4 worked well for a lot of people. As a bit of core kernel software to start with, to add your own drivers and what not, it'd be a good start. Certainly, it'd save one a _lot_ of work from starting a kernel from scratch (and note there are people doing exactly that to build a permissive licence kernel). So there's definitely value in 15 year old Linux. There's software I've worked on where the 15 year old code similarly would be a good start.

As "the rest" I mean non-copyleft, permissive open-source software and proprietary particularly. Until such time as there's a *general* sunset clause that makes _all_ X-years-old software permissively licensed, if I choose copyleft for some software instead of permissive then I did so for a reason, and that reason would not be invalidated by a relatively short amount of time if the copyright system still gives others 90+ years (and even then, doesn't require source release).

It doesn't seem a universally useful clause anyway.

The kernel community confronts GPL enforcement

Posted Sep 6, 2016 13:52 UTC (Tue) by patrick_g (subscriber, #44470) [Link]

> So there's definitely value in 15 year old Linux

More than in a current and modern version of FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD ?
I doubt it.

The kernel community confronts GPL enforcement

Posted Sep 7, 2016 15:19 UTC (Wed) by rfontana (subscriber, #52677) [Link]

Here was the original rationale for the 'copyleft sunset' provision:
https://lists.fedorahosted.org/pipermail/copyleft-next/20...