[License-discuss] Shortest copyleft licence

[Tim Makarios]

On Wed, 2015-04-01 at 08:32 -0400, Ben Cotton wrote:
> 
> On Apr 1, 2015 4:04 AM, "Tim Makarios" <tjm1983 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 6:24 PM, Tim Makarios <tjm1983 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> 
> > Really?  Then do the BSD and ISC licences also violate the OSD and
> FSD,
> > because they don't require the source code of derivative works to be
> > made available?
> >
> But they do make the source code of the original work available, which
> makes them open source but not copyleft.

No, the licences don't make the source code available, the programmers
(generally) do.  There's nothing to stop someone from applying the ISC
licence to a binary blob.
> 
> > So is CC-BY-SA also non-copyleft?
> >
> No, the ShareAlike aspect of CC-BY-SA makes it copyleft.

Right, but CC-BY-SA doesn't require the publication of source code, does
it?  Someone, for peculiar reasons of their own, could choose to apply
CC-BY-SA to a binary blob.  Of course, this wouldn't make the binary
blob into open source software, since the source wouldn't be available.
But nor would it make CC-BY-SA into a non-copyleft licence.

I contend that it's possible to write a simple copyleft licence that
doesn't require the publication of source code.  When such a licence is
applied to human-preferred source code, it would make that source code
into open source software; when it's applied to binary blobs (which
might be derivative works of open source software covered by the
licence), it wouldn't make those binary blobs into open source software,
but it would still be a copyleft licence.

Tim
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