What's next?

[Richard E. Fontana & Bradley M. Kuhn]

We excitedly announce that the two of us (Richard and Bradley) have been in
discussions [1] for a few months to restart, revitalize, and relaunch
copyleft-next!

Today, GPLv3 turns exactly 18 years old.  This month, GPLv2 turned 34 years
old.  These are both great licenses and we love them.  Nevertheless, at
least once in a generation, FOSS needs a new approach to strong copyleft.

Both of us were involved with the Drafting Committees of GPLv3, and we
learned much from what was done right and (frankly) what was done wrong in
drafting GPLv3.  Indeed, Richard was prescient with copyleft-next — taking
lessons learned from the GPLv3 process and doing copyleft license drafting
better.  So, what Richard began — almost exactly 13 years ago — as an
experimental hobby, we relaunch today as a serious and professional effort
to create the next generation of copyleft license.

As most of you probably know, Bradley works full-time as the policy fellow
at Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) — primarily on issues of copyleft.
For the last year, Bradley has been slowly making the case internally to ask
SFC to provide resources (in the form of infrastructural support and
Bradley's staff time) to relaunch copyleft-next.  We are pleased to announce
that SFC has agreed!  SFC will provide system resources to host our website,
mailing list, and Forgejo instance [2] for the copyleft-next project, and
Bradley will dedicate at least four focused hours/week to the project.
Bradley has also created a Mastodon instance for fediverse updates — so you
can also follow: https://fedi.copyleft.org/@next

A gracious volunteer years ago donated to Bradley the domain name
“copyleft.org” as a place to host work to advance copyleft.  We're excited
to host all these new resources in that domain name.  The beginnings of a
new website are now live on https://next.copyleft.org/.

Bradley and Richard will serve equally as co-Editors-in-Chief of
copyleft-next.  We will continue with the Hindering Backchannels Rule (HBR)
(formerly known as the Harvey Birdman Rule) and also we will work with haste
to add an appropriate and more typical Code of Conduct, too.

We'll leave the archives currently found at
https://lists.fedorahosted.org/archives/list/copyleft-next@lists.fedorahosted.org/
in place indefinitely, and have a low-priority TODO to migrate the content
into the archives of the new list for posterity.

Of course, it was always intended that copyleft-next remain an independent
project.  Both of us will always disclose publicly any (actual or potential)
conflicts of interest and our work on copyleft-next will always be in our
personal capacities.  We ask other contributors to do the same.

Relatedly, while SFC has agreed to host and sponsor this project, SFC is
currently neutral on the question of whether SFC should be the official
license steward of copyleft-next.  We have seen various problems regarding
stewardship of licenses (even by nonprofit charities), and we expect the
issue of “Does copyleft-next need a steward to succeed?” will be an
immediate topic of early discussion.  We both consider that still an open
question.

Summary of new URLs for the project:

Website:       https://next.copyleft.org/

Repository:    https://git.copyleft.org/copyleft-next/copyleft-next

Mailing List:  https://lists.copyleft.org/mailman/listinfo/next
               next at lists.copyleft.org

Fedi/Mastodon: https://fedi.copyleft.org/@next


Sincerely,
Richard E. Fontana and Bradley M. Kuhn

[1] It is possible that some of these discussions did not comply with the
    Hindering Backchannels Rule, but we plan to post HBR Cure posts in the
    weeks to come.

[2] Long-time aficionados will recall copyleft-next was first hosted on
    GitHub, moved to Gitorious for software freedom reasons, and when (what
    we called) the “Gitorious Apocalypse” happened, copyleft-next eventually
    landed back on GitHub.  We both feel hosting this project on GitHub is
    clearly now a Bad Idea, and moving the repositories to the new Forgejo
    instance at https://git.copyleft.org/copyleft-next/copyleft-next
    effectively immediately.  We'll sort out making it clear on the old
    GitHub link that it's deprecated in the first weeks of July 2025.