Questions about copyleft-next

[secureblueadmin]

Oops, duh! Thanks for the correction, licensing law is not intuitive to me :)


On Monday, June 30th, 2025 at 3:32 PM, Denver Gingerich <denver at ossguy.com> wrote:

> 
> 
> On Mon, Jun 30, 2025 at 10:18:19PM +0000, secureblueadmin wrote:
> 
> > 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?
> 
> 
> Wouldn't the project that you're incorporating it into cease to be "dual licensed" then? It would be the same as incorporating code under GPL into that project - you can't do that, unless the project either loses its "dual" license, or the contributors of that code permit you to use a second license.
> 
> Denver