Questions about copyleft-next

[Richard Fontana]

On Tue, Jul 1, 2025 at 2:00 PM secureblueadmin
<secureblueadmin at proton.me> wrote:

> I think something got mixed up here. I was making two separate and unrelated points.
>
> Point 1: Why have an explicit inbound list as opposed to allowing any license approved by the OSI and FSF?

I don't remember, but I remember that various approaches were
experimented with for dealing with license compatibility (both the
general or inbound compatibility issue or whatever people started
calling it way back in the 2010s, and the special problem of GPL
compatibility).

In the latest "Draft" there's an appendix with an enumeration of
"Compatible Licenses", including a subset consisting of "GPL-Family
Licenses". Whereas it appears that the approach taken in 0.3.1 was
something reminiscent of what (in a completely different context) I
once called the "Rule of Two" (that is, an inbound-compatible license
has to be both FSF-free and OSI-approved). That Rule of Two was
actually meant to describe the Software Freedom Conservancy's policy
on licensing of member projects, if I'm remembering correctly. So
undoubtedly that was the inspiration.

I think this, like pretty much everything else IMO, has to be
completely rethought. :)

> Point 2 is a hypothetical:
>
> Say for whatever reason I want to get around the network licensing clause of copyleft-next. copyleft-next allows me to disregard any condition of copyleft-next that conflicts with the terms of a Compatible License:
>
> >  If the Compatible License is a GPL-Family License, and a condition in the Compatible License conflicts with any of the terms of this License, You have permission to comply with that Compatible License condition.

> The GPL contains "no further restrictions" clauses that conflict with the "network distribution" clause of copyleft-next. Therefore to circumvent the network distribution clause, I can write some GPL code, mix it with copyleft-next code, and release that as a new project-ng without the network distribution clause, as permitted by the copyleft-next draft license and as required by the GPL. Now I've created a version of the original code that can be used downstream without adherence to the network clause.
>
> What am I missing here?

It's possible you're right. There was a general assumption for the
entire (active) history of drafting of copyleft-next (if I remember
correctly) that GPL compatibility was *so* important as a pragmatic
goal that all other policies of the license could be subverted in
favor of that goal, although I don't think I or anyone else put it
that way explicitly. I think that assumption is probably questionable
now, but I don't know.

There might be ways of specifically addressing your concern about the
network services issue. The obvious one might be to distinguish
between AGPLv3 and GPLvn. At that point, though, given how little
non-proprietary-relicensed AGPLv3 code there is in the world, it
probably makes sense just to give up on GPL compatibility (which,
after all, you could achieve in other ways, like dual-licensing).

Richard