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

[Bradley M. Kühn]

First, to answer Ted's question from myself (Richard already answered
from his perspective upthread): I was thinking of the whole class
of weak copylefts from “very weak” to “somewhat weak” (i.e., MPL,
EPL, LGPL, and the Classpath Exception² too).

Folks will be surprised to learn that these days — at least until we
release copyleft-next 1.0 — LGPLv2.1 is my favorite copyleft license,
for various reasons.  I like it more than GPLv[23] now. 🤭

Nevertheless, it's unclear to me about the library thing.  glibc
needed LGPLv2.1 because there were *so many* libc implementations
that there was no chance that anyone was going to use a GPLv2'd C
library with so many other options available (which remained true for
decades — the number of times libc has been reimplemented … 🤦 … but
that's OT. 😀)

While there was a period of time when I was a paid representative of
the FSF and avoided saying so publicly, (and Ted will probably like
to learn this, as he and I debated this long ago when I
worked for FSF): IMO, FSF *erred* (& continues to err) by insisting
libreadline stay GPLvN-or-later rather than moving to
LGPLv2.1-or-later after libedit caught up.

What I'm wondering, though, is, given what's happening in computing,
as development cycles becoming shorter and shorter (for various
reasons, including but not limited to LLM-gen-AI assistance),
re-implementing an API from scratch is a lot easier than it once was.


Also, the community has bifurcated so badly that no one wants to
“live in the middle”.  What I'm seeing is that folks either want
copyleft to save the world from for-profit control of codebases¹, or
they are fine with for-profit control of codebases.

Ultimately, weak copylefts and non-copyleft licenses can be so easily
manipulated by a single company or a cartel of companies so that only
some but not all of the code is available.  OpenDaylight is a great
example of where this works great: the code itself is only of
interest to companies who build really really big networks, so they
can use the EPL as form of a “non-compete treaty” among each other to
decide what parts of software stack they want to not-compete on, and
then proprietarize to compete on the rest.

Who needs that anymore?

However, Ted does raise an interesting point: can anyone think of an
example of a project that uses the LGPL in the way that I describe?
🤔 Maybe it's an exception to my “no weak copyleft” rule?

Finally, yes, I know that for-profit companies love non-copylefted
code.  So what?  We've been kowtowing to "oh, Big Tech, please
adopt our software and fund it!" for decades.  What has it gotten
us?  A bunch of underfunded maintainers, and a precious few who
are well funded but hopelessly overworked.

And the projects that have that situation the worst?  The ones
under non-copyleft licenses, of course!


¹ Yes, the strongest copylefts like AGPLv3 are indeed used in weird
  proprietary relicensing schemes, but “copyleft equality”  clause
  (which Richard initially named “copyleft nullification” takes care
  of that problem).

² I'm a co-author of the Classpath Exception, and I argued pretty
  hard that it should be called the Least GPL. 😀  No one else liked
  the idea.
--
     -- bkühn — On Fediverse (via Mastodon): https://fedi.copyleft.org/@bkuhn