[License-discuss] [License-Discuss] For Review: New strong copyleft license draft with transparency and user rights provisions

[BonzuPII]

Hello friends of the open source community,

Over the past couple of weeks, I have been working to write a new copyleft software license that seeks to address some of the issues I see (and that surely many of us have felt deeply frustrated with) within the open software ecosystem, and the software ecosystem as a whole. As I am not a legal expert, I've had to heavily utilize LLMs in order to come up with a workable first draft, but I am now at the point where collaboration with machines is no longer sufficient and collaboration with human experts is the only viable option for moving forward.

Within the license contains many standard copyleft license provisions heavily inspired by the GNU GPL and aGPL version 3, some of these are likely misworded and need to have loopholes sealed up. Furthermore, I've added provisions enforcing transparency in commercial usage and development of free software, transparency in data collection and data privacy, preventing external ToS and service contracts from restricting the practical exercise of rights afforded by the license, and reciprocity by expanding definitions of derivative works, among other things. Many of these new provisions are experimental with questionable/hypothetical legal enforcibility and OSD compliance. I aim to "bake in" a standard, Immutable ToS/Privacy Policy into the license that entities licensing material under this license must adhere to, however I understand this particular endeavor may pose challenges with OSD compliance, maybe there is a better way to go about this. I may have also mistakenly left out vital standard copyleft provisions as well.

My goal with this license is to create a general purpose, strong copyleft, open source definition compliant, ethical software license that is officially recognized by the Open Source Initiative. If minds sharper than mine could please take a few minutes to review it and suggest/debate revisions, I would be extremely grateful! Anyways, without further ado, here is the license: https://paste.rs/Ccj9k.markdown

For now, it's just a paste dump on pasters, but if any of you would like, I can open up a github or gitlab repo so you can issue "bug" reports, PRs, engage in discussion there, etc..

Anyways, that's all for now! Thank you in advance for taking the time to read my email and review my license, I hope something great will come of this.

- Micah
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