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

[Tim Makarios]

On Thu, 2015-07-30 at 18:23 -0700, Josh Berkus wrote:
> On 07/19/2015 06:17 PM, Tim Makarios wrote:
> > Apart from the copyleft requirement, the NCCL is similar in effect to
> > very permissive licences, such as the ISC License.  However, the ISC
> > License reserves to the creator the right to sue redistributors of the
> > software and its derivatives if they fail to distribute the copyright
> > notice and licence with all copies of the software; the NCCL attempts to
> > make it impossible for the creator to sue redistributors for any such
> > omission.
> 
> So, two questions:
> 
> 1. if the right to sue is specifically excluded, how are the license
> terms to be enforced?  And in what way is the right to sue excluded,
> given that there is no such langauge in the license itself?

If the licence works as I intended, then the right to sue is excluded
simply because the licence explicitly allows you to do (almost) anything
with the licensed work.  The one thing you can't do is impose your own
extra restrictions on users of derivative works you might create.

> 2. As a developer, under what circumstances would I prefer this license?
>  In other words, what real need does it serve?

You might prefer NCCL if you don't want to worry about checking whether
the source of derivative works carries "prominent notices stating that
[the creators of the derivative works] modified it, and giving a
relevant date" and that when they "Convey individual copies of the
object code", they include "a copy of the written offer to provide the
Corresponding Source", and satisfy all the other requirements of GPL v3
(for example).  You might prefer NCCL if you don't want to be making an
implicit threat to sue creators of derivative works if they fail to
satisfy these requirements.

Or, relative to CC0, you might prefer NCCL if you want to be sure that
creators of derivative works won't sue you for taking the same liberties
with their derivative works as they took with your original work.

In a sense, NCCL is aiming to be right at one edge of the space of
possible licences --- the permissive-most edge of copyleft licences.
You could imagine that minor requirements could be added to or removed
from GPL v3, for example, without fundamentally altering its nature as a
copyleft free software licence.  But if NCCL does what I want it to do,
then you can't really add or remove any restrictions without making it
easier to create a situation in which people can be sued for their use
of derivative works.

Tim
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