Questions about copyleft-next
secureblueadmin
secureblueadmin at proton.me
Mon Jun 30 22:18:19 UTC 2025
I came across this project from a promotional post on Reddit and found it interesting as a FOSS developer. As someone who's not a lawyer, I have a question regarding the license. There's this section, which is an interesting way of preventing (A)GPL/commercial dual licensing:
7. Nullification of Copyleft/Proprietary Dual Licensing
If I offer to license, for a fee, a Covered Work under terms other than
a license that is OSI-Approved or FSF-Free as of the release date of this
License or a numbered version of copyleft-next released by the
Copyleft-Next Project, then the license I grant You under section 1 is no
longer subject to the conditions in sections 3 through 5.
However, this license also says:
If the Derived Work includes material licensed under the GPL, You may
instead license the Derived Work under the GPL.
As far as I can tell, it would seem that if there's some code under copyleft-next that you want to include in your GPL/commercial dual licensed software, you can just create a Derived work that combines `copyleft-next` code with `GPL` code, and then use that derived work (now under the GPL) in your GPL/commercial dual licensed software. Is this not a loophole?
Anyhow, thanks for taking the time to read this and bear with my lack of legal knowledge :)
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