[License-review] Request for approval of the Non-Coercive Copyleft Licence (NCCL) 1.0

[John Cowan]

Tim Makarios scripsit:

> Would that situation be fundamentally different from what the situation
> would be if every user of the NCCL voluntarily dual-licensed their work
> under both NCCL and GPL v3?

No.

> If not, is there benefit in making such
> dual-licensing effectively compulsory?

I think so.  It makes it more probable that people developing GPL
applications will be able to reuse NCCL code without having to make
special requests to the author.

> The downside of compulsory dual-licensing would be that there would no
> longer be the option of ensuring (to the greatest extent possible) that
> no-one could be sued for their use of derivative works of an
> NCCL-licensed work.

I don't understand that.  If the NCCL imposes any restrictions (which
it does) on derivative works, then people can be sued for violating
those restrictions.  If you want to avoid that, use a CC0 license.

> In practice, I imagine that a fair proportion of users of the NCCL
> wouldn't be averse to also licensing their work under GPL v3, especially
> if someone wanted to make something that was a derivative work of both
> the NCCL-licensed work and an existing GPL-v3-licensed work.

By dual licensing automatically, you eliminate additional friction.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
Would your name perchance be surname Puppet, given name Sock?
                --Rick Moen