Accidental Public License?

Allison Randal allison at perl.org
Wed Apr 6 20:56:24 UTC 2011


I have accidentally given birth to a new copyleft license. I've received 
a request for permission to use my "Simplified GPL" for an open source 
project:

http://radar.oreilly.com/2007/05/gplv3-clarity-and-simplicity.html

I'm not asking for this license to be approved by the OSI, but I'm very 
aware of the fact that it has only so far been examined in detail by me 
and one intellectual property lawyer. I would appreciate any feedback, 
especially highlighting any flaws that would make this a poor choice for 
an open source project. (There are some details in that draft that I 
would remove if I were writing a stand-alone copyleft license. I was 
sticking slavishly to the GPLv3 terms for the sake of illustration.)

I'm generally against license proliferation, but I also don't see a 
clear alternative to suggest that accomplishes the same copyleft goals 
as the GPL, without the archaic ambiguities of GPLv2 or the unnecessary 
complexity of GPLv3.

Allison



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