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

[Richard Fontana]

On Tue, Jul 14, 2026 at 4:54 AM Stefano Zacchiroli <zack at upsilon.cc> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Jul 13, 2026 at 10:25:39PM -0400, Richard Fontana wrote:
>
> > 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.
>
> You surprised me with that last paragraph; it seems to go in a different
> direction than the rest of the mail. Are you saying that an exception
> that implements weak copyleft on top of the standard copyleft-next is
> something you would be willing to consider? If so, that would be
> analogous to how LGPL-3 is implemented today, and I'm not sure what
> we're discussing in this subthread anymore :-).

I was thinking of the non-LGPL tradition of having relatively
minimalist GPLv2 exceptions, like (whatever its substantive faults)
the GNU Classpath Exception. I feel like this worked somewhat well in
practice, particularly in the pre-GPLv3 world, apart from the general
lack of standardization.

What I would be disinclined to favor is something like LGPLv3, which
is largely just LGPLv2.x with its early 1990s oddities disguised to
look like an elaborate 21st century GPLv3 additional permission.

Richard