<div dir="ltr">Bruce, <div>My read is that there are two motivations to the copyleft license. </div><div>1. The purist motivation is based on the ideal that there should be no proprietary code (or at least that users of someone else's code should have access to that code as a sort of "right to repair" as expressed by the four freedoms). </div><div>2. The other is a commercial motivation to construct license terms that are permissive enough to get attention and adoption by curious (employed) developers, but "threatening" enough to convert their companies into licensors of the commercial terms.</div><div><br></div><div>Nearly all companies (folks at Red Hat and the like are a noted exception), accept the need for proprietary code to exist and to be created -- either because they sell licenses to it, or more importantly, because the disclosure of their code may be harmful to their commercial venture (e.g. revealing security flaws, customer data, or their crafted algorithms). They recognize that some who license using copyleft (the purists) resent their dependence and creation of proprietary software, and agree to disagree amicably. It's that second group of copyleft licensors that pose a different concern. They are in the business of selling protection from the license threats they create.</div><div><br></div><div>It is this second group who have legitimate interest in making money, who are exploring new license structures and terms to protect their revenue interests. They use the licenses of purists when they are helpful, and create proprietary ones when they need to. </div><div><br></div><div>Thus when pointing to the need to understand the motivation of those who create these license -- I agree with you, not only 100%, but 200% because you have to include the second group who clearly believe in creating proprietary software (their "enterprise editions"), but who use the tools created by those who do not, in order to convert interest into revenue from employees who don't quite understand the parameters of these licenses.</div><div><br></div><div>Gil Yehuda</div><div><br></div><div><br></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Wed, Jan 23, 2019 at 3:30 PM Bruce Perens <<a href="mailto:bruce@perens.com">bruce@perens.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><br></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail-m_8887146194192649121gmail_attr">On Wed, Jan 23, 2019 at 12:14 PM Lawrence Rosen <<a href="mailto:lrosen@rosenlaw.com" target="_blank">lrosen@rosenlaw.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div lang="EN-US"><div class="gmail-m_8887146194192649121gmail-m_8642738239076206476WordSection1"><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:0.5in"><span style="font-size:12pt">Gil Yehuda wrote:<br>> </span><span style="color:black">I wondered why we don't have an A/LGPL (or A/MPL, A/EPL) that addresses the "non-conveyed software gap" but also limits the scope of copyleft to the work itself.<u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12pt"><u></u> <u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12pt">We do. OSL 3.0.</span></p></div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>This is missing the point. While Larry is happy to create another license which implements a limited copyleft, the Free Software Foundation's purpose is, of course, Free Software. So, while all manner of things <i>could </i>be done to facilitate addition of proprietary software to software under one of their licenses, they have done what they think is necessary to support that in issuing LGPL and GPL-with-exception, and simply aren't interested in going any farther.</div><div><br></div><div>This is important, because you will have all manner of unfulfilled expectations if you understand licenses, but don't understand the motivations of the people who create them.</div><div><br></div><div> Thanks</div><div><br></div><div> Bruce</div></div></div>
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