Patrick McHardy and copyright profiteering (Opensource.com) [LWN.net]

Patrick McHardy and copyright profiteering (Opensource.com)

Posted Aug 25, 2017 19:13 UTC (Fri) by coriordan (guest, #7544)
In reply to: Patrick McHardy and copyright profiteering (Opensource.com) by fratti
Parent article: Patrick McHardy and copyright profiteering (Opensource.com)

> One could argue that the GPL's long-winded and complex license ...

We've been using GPL for 36 years. If there was a concise way to put copyleft in a licence, someone would have done it by now.

This was a major theme in drafting GPL3. There were people bemoaning the number of words, but when they were asked which sentences to delete, they wandered off. Some continued moaning.

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Patrick McHardy and copyright profiteering (Opensource.com)

Posted Aug 26, 2017 10:33 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

The problem is lawyers will take advantage of any loophole.

Imho patenting software is an abuse of patent law. The GPL is supposed to be a copyright licence (patents shouldn't even enter into it!). Yet it's got a load of patent language in there, simply to fix a legal problem that shouldn't exist!

So yes, there is a lot of stuff in the GPL that shouldn't be there. But it's there because it's needed :-(

Cheers,
Wol

Patrick McHardy and copyright profiteering (Opensource.com)

Posted Aug 26, 2017 14:11 UTC (Sat) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (2 responses)

>We've been using GPL for 36 years. If there was a concise way to put copyleft in a licence, someone would have done it by now.
And they did: https://github.com/copyleft-next/copyleft-next

Patrick McHardy and copyright profiteering (Opensource.com)

Posted Aug 26, 2017 15:33 UTC (Sat) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link] (1 responses)

Well, they certainly tried, and are still trying.

But since no projects are using the licence, and consequently it has never been tested in court or even been looked at by an "enemy" in the software field, we can't currently say they've succeeded in making a simpler GPL replacement.

Patrick McHardy and copyright profiteering (Opensource.com)

Posted Aug 26, 2017 22:30 UTC (Sat) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

There's bound to be an equivalent of Schneier's Law for software licenses.