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

[Kyle Mitchell]

Nigel,

Thanks again.  You make many valid points.  However, those points go to whether you think L0-R advisable, or to what business models you think developers should and shouldn't attempt, and not to whether L0-R meets the Open Source Definition.

I don't understand OSI license review as a process of conferring blanket OSI approval on any business model, company, or community, or of prescribing any particular approach among many that count as Open Source.  OSI has approved a number of company-specific licenses; I don't take those as endorsements of the entities involved.  And OSI has approved some licenses now placed in a "redundant" category; that's clearly no promotional boon.

The only help I ask from OSI is the help that it offers---the time unavoidably required to apply the Definition to L0-R, approve it as an Open Source license, or clarify which Definition criteria it misses and how it might be revised to comply.  I'm happy to answer any questions posed during the process, and the guide to the process makes clear that I should do so.  Indeed, there are many good conversations to be had about the issues L0-R touches.  But most aren't the business at hand.

On other writing:

Others are welcome to read what I've written publicly on L0-R, L0-NC, and License Zero more generally:

https://medium.com/licensezero

Those posts touch on a few points of legal significance and license design, in passing, but in the main treat community, business, and, frankly, policy questions that I don't understand belong here on license-review.  Perhaps on license-discuss.

I've been selective here, and followed the prescribed submission format, to respect the time of those involved.  A dump of all my prior writing would have had quite the opposite effect, punishing those generous enough to read straight through with a great deal that's irrelevant or simply out-of-date.  The same effect by sending a list of links, at the additional cost of a skeletal mailing list archive record.

On copyright "traps":

I'm afraid I must object to "trap", just as I objected to "coercion".  "Trap" has been leveled at all strong copyleft licenses.  But license conditions as a legal mechanism, by definition, take permission away, making grounds for IP suits.  That's as true of attribution, list-changes, and other typical permissive-license conditions as it is of more involved copyleft conditions.  An anecdote: I'm fond of polling developers at events about Apache-2.0 NOTICE files.  Many don't believe when I tell them!

Some conditions are more difficult to apply, in practice, than others.  But neither relatively easy conditions, nor relatively hard ones, nor great heaps of condition language---AGPL is about four times the length of L0-R, I believe---apparently disqualify a license as Open Source.  Unless they trip over the criteria.

On noncommercial terms:

You're right.  I do want a noncommercial software license.  So I wrote one, L0-NC, based in part on CC-BY-NC, just as you mentioned.  That is obviously _not_ an Open Source license.  I won't be troubling OSI about it!

With L0-R, I wanted something very different: a stronger-than-strong copyleft license,  a more aggressive legal implementation of community values that prize publicly available source code and Open Source terms.  In other words, Open Source values.  Yes, that want is partly motivated by a desire to offer license terms that incentivize some downstream users to pay for alternative terms, in financial support of developers who do work in the open.  The effect is to make dual licensing a viable model for independent developers.  Independent developers who can choose between a noncommercial and a reciprocal public license---L0-NC or L0-R---as they prefer.

Your view of L0-R as a kind of back-door noncommercial license, and therefore not an Open Source license, sits uneasily with your point that developers could achieve the same practical effect with AGPL in lieu of L0-R.  Neither AGPL nor L0-R discriminates against commerce as a field of endeavor, or against commercial entities as groups, under the Definition.  It is possible to run a business, as an individual or a large company, making and using strong-copyleft code.  Dual licensing opportunity springs from the fact that many people and groups---not just commercial ones---discriminate against Open Source in how they choose to go about their business.

Permissive licenses practice Open Source values, but don't hold others accountable for them.  Copyleft licenses do.  You're right that AGPL is the go-to license choice for dual licensing businesses.  It's strongest, common, OSI-approved copyleft license going.  MongoDB has just filed to go public.  It won't be the last on that model.

AGPL is an Open Source license.  Which criteria of the Open Source Definition does AGPL meet that L0-R does not?

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