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Re: [ProgSoc] GPL & CDDL



On Fri, 2007-11-09 at 17:49 +1100, Nathan de Vries wrote:

> My point is, why can't the GPL play nice with other free software
> licences such as the CDDL [2]? Will the GPLv3 fix this to some degree,
> or are we stuck in a re-licencing cycle every time a non-GPL project
> wants to play nice?

The problem arises with copyleft licenses (rather than free software
licenses in general) and is a difficult-to-avoid consequence of
"enforced freedom"; it can only be achieved by entrenching certain
limitations and, at least to date, no-one has come up with a workable
means to simultaneously entrench and also facilitate license change; as
soon as the latter is available, private appropriators will use it to
betray.

For all of those late-'90s projects (and some more recent ones) that
made poor license choices, re-licensing is the only feasible option.

A broader approach may exist along the lines of Lessig's
parameterisation (the Creative Commons), but no such parameterisation
exists for all of the copyleft licenses and, even if it did, getting
widespread adoption may take decades.

I'd suggest looking at the problem from a different angle: there is a
finite (large, but finite) number of existing widely-used pieces of
software with free-software (and in particular, copyleft) licenses that
aren't GPLv2. Getting that lot re-licensed is going to take time, and
that process is already underway, albeit very slowly.

There are, however, an unbounded number of not-yet founded projects
whose license choice is still open. Perhaps there is mileage to be had
here in actively advocated dual-licensing from the outset. To date the
Open-Source Initiative has limited itself to cataloging and certifying
licenses, and grouping them into preferred and non-preferred groups.
What it has not done is to attack the assumption that any given piece of
code must carry one license; there would seem to be room for
dual-licensing advocacy because the issue isn't just whether one license
is better than another, but that collaboration is the game, there's a
lot of valuable existing code and mutual exclusivity isn't helping.

(That didn't come out very cleanly, but it only occurred to me while I
was typing it. No-one seems to be doing this yet...)

- Raz


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