[License-review] For Approval: License Zero Reciprocal Public License

[Kyle Mitchell]

On 2017-10-20 11:10, Josh berkus wrote:
> On 10/19/2017 08:21 PM, Kyle Mitchell wrote:
> > The alternative to all of this is to drop the grace period
> > entirely.  It would be possible to comply with that license,
> > assuming you work "in the open" and apply the same public
> > license to your code.  But we all know not everyone, in
> > every context, can do that.  We could build in retroactive
> > forgiveness for those that eventually publish Open Source,
> > but that vitiates the incentive to comply in the first
> > place.
>
> So, please do understand that these comments are mine personally --
> you've already seen commends by Perens and Fontana, and will no doubt
> see others.

Understood.  That doesn't make your comments any less valued
or appreciated!

> I'd be inclined to drop the grace period, because I can't see any way in
> which it's enforceable.  And what would be the point of certifying, or
> adopting, a license which can't be enforced?

Perhaps I've misunderstood what you mean by "enforceable"
before.  Do you mean that, with the grace period, an L0-R
licensor might never be in a position to successfully argue
that a licensee has failed to abide by the new license
conditions, 3 and 4?

> However, without the grace period, what you have is materially a more
> compact form of the LGPL license.  And is the value of reducing a 3-page
> license to 1 page enough to make it worth adding another license to the
> OSS ecosystem?  Or is there a practical difference between this and the
> LGPL that I'm missing?

I believe there's a significant practical difference.

L0-R is designed to trigger copyleft requirements in far
more situations than would LGPL.  For example, I would read
"[u]ses as a part of other software" to reach use as a
shared library.

-- 
Kyle Mitchell, attorney // Oakland // (510) 712 - 0933