Jumping the licensing shark

Posted Mar 27, 2023 12:28 UTC (Mon) by joib (subscriber, #8541)
In reply to: Jumping the licensing shark by bluca
Parent article: Jumping the licensing shark

> You keep characterizing in general terms as "weak"

I use "weak" as in "weak copyleft", a commonly used term covering a bunch of licenses like LGPL, MPL, EPL and so forth. No moral judgement implied. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft#Strong_and_weak_co...

> You might disagree with the purpose

I'm not disagreeing with the purpose. I think the idea is perfectly valid, and suitable to a lot of software. My only argument, which I've been repeating in this entire subthread (and I'm beginning to wonder what I'm doing wrong as I'm clearly not making myself understood?), is that it's pretty easy to circumvent the protections offered by weak copyleft licenses. Thus, against an unscrupulous leecher that doesn't want to share their improvements to the library, they offer little more than a permissive license.

Jumping the licensing shark

Posted Mar 30, 2023 13:05 UTC (Thu) by bluca (subscriber, #118303) [Link] (1 responses)

The vast, vast majority of copyleft-licensed libraries use a "weak copyleft" license such as LGPL, because it's just unusable otherwise. What evidence do you have of "unscrupulous leechers" making improvements to said libraries and not sharing them due to the license?

Jumping the licensing shark

Posted Mar 30, 2023 20:08 UTC (Thu) by joib (subscriber, #8541) [Link]

> The vast, vast majority of copyleft-licensed libraries use a "weak copyleft" license such as LGPL, because it's just unusable otherwise.

I know, and I don't disagree. Though the FSF seems to think the world should create more GPL licensed libraries: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html

> What evidence do you have of "unscrupulous leechers" making improvements to said libraries and not sharing them due to the license?

Off the top of my head, I can't come up with any; OTOH it's not an issue that I've been tracking either. But if such cases are indeed very rare, as I suspect they are, that would imply that the entire issue of 'unscrupulous leechers' is mostly non-existent, and in reality users prefer to contribute back improvements to the libraries so they don't have to shoulder the burden of maintaining their own forks. From that it follows those libraries could just as well have been licensed under permissive licenses, as what protects the libraries from 'proprietarization' is mostly the desire to avoid maintaining their own fork rather than the weak copyleft license (which, as mentioned, is easy to circumvent in case anyone would want to go down that route).

Oh dear, this is starting to sound a lot like the open source side of ye olde 'open source vs. free software' debate.