What is permissive-next for?

[Richard Fontana]

On Sun, Jul 6, 2025 at 4:05 PM James Frost <james at frost.cx> wrote:
>
> I was wondering what the intent of the permissive-next[1] licence was?
>
> By my reading it is essentially equivalent to the Apache 2.0 licence,
> does it add anything that I have missed? It seems to me that permissive
> licences are plenty well covered by the Apache 2.0/MIT/BSD licences.
>
> Does this licence add anything over Apache 2.0 that I have missed, or is
> there some other reason for its creation?

The way I remember it, at certain points in the active drafting
history of copyleft-next, the project had these bouts of ambition, or
hubris or whatever, one of which was entertaining the idea that
copyleft-next could also be the basis of a *noncopyleft* license
variant, thus giving rise potentially to a suite of textually similar
model licenses comparable to the Creative Commons licenses.

I pretty much agree with you that at this point "permissive licences
are plenty well covered by the Apache 2.0/MIT/BSD licences" (not to
mention zillions of others) and I think permissive-next should be
abandoned so that copyleft-next can focus entirely on copyleft.

Richard

> [1]:
> https://git.copyleft.org/copyleft-next/copyleft-next/src/commit/85138bac3ff7e0d94a6c76ae1ea3ba7011efad07/Drafts/permissive-next