[License-discuss] Weak copyleft license with network use requirement?

[Bruce Perens]

Just as an exercise, take any Open Source you like, tell an AI to do a
clean-room re-implementation, put it under a different license, and wonder
how much meaning copyright and licensing have for Open Source any
logner. For example, I did this yesterday with Codec2 for technical, not
licensing, reasons, to make it use fixed-point instead of floating point.
The resulting CODEC is within 0.99996 conformance with the original for its
bitstream. See
https://github.com/BrucePerens/hams_open/tree/main/daemons/ham_digital_modes/src/codec2_3200

I started filing patents. I have 46! I don't see that any other protection
is valid for Open Source any longer.

    Thanks

    Bruce


On Sat, Sep 5, 2026 at 3:21 PM Viatrix via License-discuss <
license-discuss at lists.opensource.org> wrote:

> Hello license-discuss,
>
> Is there a license or combination of licenses which apply to the
> following situation, and if not, would it be a good idea to create such
> a license?
> Situation: Someone writes a software library, wishes to mandate its
> source code be available to users including users over a network (à la
> AGPL), but otherwise wishes to make it weak-copyleft.
>
> I cannot find a license which would always satisfy this.
> Licenses I have considered but which may present problems:
>
> • AGPL with a classpath exception: Potential for incompatibility if the
>   library itself includes code under a license incompatible with AGPL.
> • EUPL: Potential for a derived work to no longer be beholden to the
>   network use requirement.
>
> If creating a new license would be a good idea, I was thinking a
> modification of the MPL 2.0 would work.
>
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-- 
Bruce Perens K6BP
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