What do the defined acronyms stand for?

[Richard Fontana]

On Tue, Jul 8, 2025 at 5:43 PM James Frost <james at frost.cx> wrote:
>
> Reading through the licence there are a couple terms that are defined as
> acronyms without being expanded. I would be interested in knowing what
> they mean. As these terms are not used repeatedly, I feel it would be
> best to write the full acronym out to improve the licence's readability.

> The acronyms are:
>
> NSS: My guess is Network Service Source. This is only used once, so
> really has no justification in being shortened.

> CCS: Covered Code Source? Not really sure about this one. This is
> referenced three times in the licence, all in section 5, so perhaps that
> could be reworded to expand the term.

These are in the latest 'Draft'.
NSS is defined at
https://git.copyleft.org/copyleft-next/copyleft-next/src/branch/main/Drafts/copyleft-next#L231-L237
CCS is defined at
https://git.copyleft.org/copyleft-next/copyleft-next/src/branch/main/Drafts/copyleft-next#L213-L224

These terms are not used in the latest 'Release' (0.3.1). However, I
see an error in the draft in that at one point it uses 'Corresponding
Source' rather than 'CCS'.

I wonder if you didn't notice the definitions because they're at the
end. In modern-day formal commercial contracts it's common to see a
set of defined terms and most often these are at the beginning of the
agreement. A number of FLOSS licenses follow this convention. I had a
former co-worker who preferred to put definitions at the end and I
believe this is what influenced the approach taken in the more recent
versions of copyleft-next. The argument is basically stylistic, that
having definitions at the beginning creates 'clutter', especially
where there's a tendency to have a lot of definitions.

If a term is only used once, you might still want it to be a defined
term (whether an acronym/initialism or not). However, I would say a
term used only once should perhaps be defined close to where it's used
rather than in a definitions section.

Richard