Re: Do we still need weak copyleft? (was Re: Exceptions to copyleft-next)

[James Frost]

>Nevertheless, I am very open to a discussion on this list on *why*
>and *whether* we need weak copyleft!
>
>IMO — after 30 years of walking the line between weak and strong
>copyleft in my work — I'm starting to wonder if we really need any
>weak versions anymore?  … I'm not decided, but “keep it strong” is
>how I lean these days.

I guess I'm going to tackle weak copyleft from the other side; permissive licences.

One of the main theoretical uses of weaker copyleft is for libraries. It is often beneficial to have the underlying libraries for some complex task be open and shared across a community, and the benefit from the increased consistency and shared development on the underlying capability.

A stronger copyleft licence would however prevent many of the use cases, whether they be proprietary project (often funding things through monetisation), or advocate internal scripts that are not intended to be shared. So the theory is that a weaker copyleft that only applies to the library code itself is needed.

In practice however I think this role is moreso served via permissive licences. Companies are a lot more comfortable with them and the compatibility is much easier to understand. The economic incentives do the rest to keep permissive things open for anything that multiple groups actually care about. One area this breaks down is hardware specific software, as only its manufacturer truly cares about it. Everyone else struggles to get over the initial investment required to get a usable solution across different hardware. (Though once they do it can very much become the standard.)

That is my personal theory of it anyway, whoch is admitted biased from the positon of working on scientific software.

Thanks,
James.