copyleft-next is a new, post-post-modern, non-weak copyleft license inspired by, though different from, the GNU GPL.
It’s an interesting experiment that is one way compatibile with GNU licenses: a software including both code under a GNU license and code under Copyleft-next can be licensed as a whole under the GNU license.
Another interesting feature is the Nullification of Copyleft/Proprietary Dual Licensing
the 15 years cutoff seems a bit arbitrary
Why reinvent the wheel?
Very good question.
Hackers reinvent wheels whenever the available wheels do not seem to work as expected.
Second, we reinvent wheels whenever the available wheels do not work as required by our use case.
Finally, hackers reinvent the wheels just for fun, for curiosity. To train to critical thinking.
Actually, a relevant part of the fun comes from answering to people asking “why reinvent the wheel?” :-)
And, of course: when figuring out the oddities of the old works is less fun than making a new one.
Or when fixing the oddities of the old works is not possible, due to licensing issues.
That’s what gave us GNU/Linux. And what could give us more copyleft licenses.
For example GNU GPLv3 starts with:
I want to go through the whole thing later, when I have time, but right off the bat I notice it doesn’t grant trademark licenses. Doesn’t that already automatically disqualify it from being an FSF-approved license? I’m thinking of the Firefox example, though maybe that was DFSG?
(That being said I’ve never had a problem with people protecting trademarks since they basically never have a real effect on the ability to use/modify/etc. the software. It might not fit the letter of the law in terms of the four freedoms but it fits the spirit.)
This is the first I’ve heard of the FSF disqualifying licenses for not granting trademarks. Is that a recent decision (e.g. to reduce license proliferation)? I would have thought that’s a separate issue to copyright license approval, since so few FSF-approved licenses grant trademark licenses (MPL, MIT, BSD, …).
When you say “FSF-approved” are you referring specifically to GPL compatibility?
Sorry, I was completely wrong! I was thinking of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_software_rebranded_by_Debian and thought the FSF was involved, but it was just Debian.
And Debian never considered Firefox non-DFSG. Mozilla considered Debian to be misusing the trademark (because they alter the source and build from source instead of using upstream binaries) and asked that they stop using the trademarks (for awhile, Debian ships officially-branded Mozilla products again)
Debian was kind of the initial objector in the saga, but they only objected to one specific thing, the Firefox logo. In 2004, they replaced the logo with a freely licensed one in the version they shipped, because Mozilla wouldn’t relicense the logo PNGs/SVGs under a free license. But the browser was still called Firefox. That was the reason for a ‘-dfsg’ suffix in the package’s version number. Those kinds of minor changes are common though. Debian even does it to some GNU packages, because they don’t consider the GNU Free Documentation License with invariant sections to be DFSG-free, so they strip out a few offending info files & tack on a -dfsg suffix.
You’re right that the name change came from Mozilla though, in 2006, when someone doing a review of the Firefox trademark seems to have objected to everything about Debian’s package: they didn’t like something with an alternate logo shipping under the “Firefox” trademark and for the first time they raised an objection to the patched source (which was patched for non-license reasons) shipping under that name. Which at that point pretty much required a rename, since even people who had thought the logo-copyright issue was petty/unimportant couldn’t accept a “no source patches allowed” condition in a free-software distribution.
Yeah, “Iceweasel” was a Debian thing; IIRC Debian wanted to backport security fixes to stable released, but avoid including any new features. Mozilla didn’t want their “brand” on the less-featureful versions (even though it was all their software…), so trademark shenanigans ensued.
The FSF do actually push their own Firefox rebrand called GNU Icecat (really imaginative naming all round!). It mostly seems to be about not “promoting” proprietary addons, etc. That doesn’t mean FSF don’t “approve” (in a technical/legal sense) the MPL as a Free Software copyright license, etc. It just means they might not advocate using certain software (Firefox), in favour of something else (Icecat).
I love to see a lawyer hacking.
I’d like to know about other copyleft experiments, either compatible or non compatible with GNU licenses.