I'm interested in helping evolve copyleft licensing, its one reason
why I really like copyleft-next license. My own primary interest in
helping evolve copyleft is I believe the current patent situation does
a huge disservice to copyleft developers, in the worst case creating
an environment where you are outlawed. To start, I decided to use
copyleft-next for one of my projects, CRDA [0] about 3 years ago after
it became clear, despite my best efforts in helping to share, that the
BSD community had no interest in taking advantage of the regulatory
framework we had created on Linux. I decided to use copyleft-next
0.3.0 once I learned that it was both a usable alternative to GPLv2
and GPLv3, and also outbound-compatible with GPLv2 and GPLv3.
I feel we need to evolve copyleft *slowly* with the community, to do
this I feel now's a good time to seek a bit more clarity on GPLv2's
compatibility and clarifications over its gains over GPLv2 and what
the implications are of using copyleft-next 0.3.0 more broadly for
GPLv2 projects. To that end can someone provide:
* A lay review of copyleft-next 0.3.0's GPLv2 compatibility. Is
there anything that is obvious that makes it GPLv2 compatible ? If so
what is is? Is there anything that makes it questionable if it is
GPLv2 compatible? If so what is is?
* A lay review (perhaps a series of bullets) of what the main
advantages of copyleft-next 0.3.0 are over GPLv2
Perhaps we can also work though an example. For instance, since CRDA
is already copyleft-next 0.3.0 licensed, say I wanted to include code
from it on a larger overall GPLv2 licensed code base, what are the
implications if I did that to the larger GPLv2 licensed body of code?
Would just the GPLv2 apply only on the larger body of code? This would
be an important criteria for me to help evolve copyleft slowly. If
this works as I expect it, then I take it the gains of doing this
would be that I can help evolve copyleft by ensuring I can take back
changes made in the larger GPLv2 code back to CRDA under copyleft-next
0.3.0. It still begs the question of *why* use copyleft-next 0.3.0.
Other than helping move the discussion forward of copyleft evolution I
think having a clear lay review of the net gains of copyleft-next
0.3.0 would be extremely useful.
[0] https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/mcgrof/crda.git/
Luis
