For Approval: SSCL

[Tzeng, Nigel H.]

>I find this concept quite nonsensical. Reciprocal "licensing
>interoperability" is unworkable for strong copyleft licenses, or to make
>it work one should inevitably dilute the requirements of one or either
>licenses. One way "interoperability" (as in the EUPL or in the "or any
>other version" clause of the *GPL) can work. This is however not a
>solution to license proliferation.

This doesn't address proliferation but interoperability.  His concern
is that other projects that use his code will not allow him to use
any of those enhancements in his original project.  The concern on the
list is that yet another copyleft does not help either proliferation
or interoperability among open source projects.

Projects that do not wish "dilution" can simply opt not to use his code 
and choose not reciprocate with other open source projects.

Regarding proliferation from Patrice-Emmanuel's original post: 

"2010/6/30, Schmitz, Patrice-Emmanuel <patrice-emmanuel.schmitz at be.unisys.com>:

In my humble opinion, the main issue is not licence proliferation 
itself, which we may all regret, but which is a definitive fact (with
1,800 F/OSS licenses tracked by BlackDuck in January 2010 !). The main 
issue is the lack of compatibility or interoperability between copyleft 
licenses, because it makes impossible the distribution of larger solutions 
(combined works)."

So if we are to consider a new copyleft, one that addresses interoperability
brings something new to the table. 

> > A GPL project could include a similar Open Source Exception much like how a
> > Classpath exception is implemented and be able to use code under this
> > license.  That probably works for MPL as well and would allow all open
> > source projects to interoperate.
  
> Again, this assumes that one project is at liberty to abdicate to some
> of the provision of the license, which is true in a negligible share of
> the cases.

We shouldn't bother to attempt to address interoperability because we'd 
have to start small?  New projects start all the time and not all
start with dependencies on copyleft code.

I for one would welcome an easy to read, non-ideological, copyleft license 
that allowed all other open source projects to reuse the code as long as 
they reciprocated that favor.