[License-discuss] Shortest copyleft licence

Tim Makarios tjm1983 at gmail.com
Mon Mar 30 07:40:56 UTC 2015


I posted this question to the contact form at opensource.org, which sent
me an automated response suggesting (among other things) posting the
question to this list, which I thought was a good idea.

I like copyleft licences preventing derivative works from being
re-monopolized, but every copyleft licence I've seen is quite long.  Is
there a really short copyleft licence, comparable in length to, say, the
ISC licence?  It may be hard to write a copyleft licence quite that
short, but I'm sure someone can do better than what I've seen so far.
What's the shortest copyleft licence people on this list know of?  It
doesn't have to be specifically a software licence; it could be one
designed for free cultural works in general.

I think the shortest copyleft licence I've seen so far (judging it
against the others by glancing at the text in a browser) is the Open
Publication Licence [1], which a more careful (automated) word-count
measures at nearly 800 words.

[1] http://opencontent.org/openpub/

Tim
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