Questions about copyleft-next

[Richard Fontana]

On Mon, Jun 30, 2025 at 6:18 PM secureblueadmin
<secureblueadmin at proton.me> 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?
>
> Anyhow, thanks for taking the time to read this and bear with my lack of legal knowledge :)

No need to apologize for what you say is a lack of legal knowledge. I
would think your question would be equally likely to be raised by a
lawyer.

Bear in mind that it's been about ... well, a long time since I
actually looked at this license :) but:

The GPL already is pretty effective at prohibiting
copyleft/proprietary dual-licensed derivative works (note: bkuhn
prefers to call this "proprietary relicensing"), since that is a
straightforward GPL violation and this is true under copyleft-next
0.3.1 too. That GPL escape hatch clause doesn't allow you to grant a
proprietary license covering your 'Derived Work'. So I think that
addresses your question, and I think this is basically the point
Denver is making in his response too.

In copyleft-next 0.3.1 the proprietary relicensing poison pill (isn't
that what we sometimes used to call it?) speaks of 'Covered Works'
which includes 'Derived Works'. But it's really always been aimed (at
least primarily) at what copyleft-next 0.3.1 calls 'My Work', that is,
the initial copylefted work released by a copyright holder. This
attempts to address a problem that was assumed to be unavoidable under
the GPL (possibly in part because of the legacy of viewing the GPL as
a bare or noncontractual copyright license).

Richard