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

[Richard Fontana]

On Sun, Jul 12, 2026 at 10:19 PM Bradley M. Kühn <bkuhn at ebb.org> wrote:
>
> Luna wrote:
> > Weaker copyleft licenses are better for some projects, and having
> > one compatible with the full copyleft-next license might be nice.
>
> I've been wondering for years if we (as a community) *really need*
> weak copyleft.  FOSS has changed so much since the LGPLv2.1 (1999),
> the Classpath Exception (≈2002), and LGPLv3 (2007) were written.
>
> Nevertheless, I am very open to a discussion on this list on *why*
> and *whether* we need weak copyleft!

Me too. I've thought for some time that weak copyleft is a failed (or
now-irrelevant) paradigm, if only because of the political success of
noncopyleft FOSS licenses. There is clearly an audience for copyleft
in general, which I think means something like strong (or at least
"non-weak" as the copyleft-next README eventually put it) copyleft,
but who really wants weak copyleft nowadays? There are certain
projects and organizations attached to *certain* historically notable
(non-GNU-pedigree) weak copyleft license families, but I don't think
that truly comes down to a belief that the concept of weak copyleft is
superior in the relevant situations. Maybe historical LGPL projects
would consider a weak variant of copyleft-next over a default strong
copyleft-next?

GPL exceptions actually worked pretty well for many base-GPLv2 (and
perhaps base-GPLv3) projects; perhaps the tradition of having
relatively simple exceptions could be adopted by the future
copyleft-next community.

Richard