[License-review] Request for approval of the Non-Coercive Copyleft Licence (NCCL) 1.0

[Tim Makarios]

On Fri, 2015-07-31 at 10:09 -0700, Josh Berkus wrote:
> Further, I really don't think OSI should be encouraging licenses which
> depend on the reciplient's knowledge of the lineage of the software
> they're receiving in order to determine lincensing, which is what the
> NCCL effectively does.  The NCCL, if used as the submitter intends, is
> basically a landmine, because it claims to still have authority over the
> code even if not included with the code.  Far from removing the ability
> to sue, the NCCL encourages surprise lawsuits.
> 
> Just imagine this scenario:
> 
> * Tim releases WidgetX under the NCCL
> * Mary releases WidgetX.1 under the NCCL, but does not include a copy of
> the license, as permitted by the NCCL.
> * George releases WidgetY, which is really a derivative of WidgetX.1,
> under the MIT license, out of a mistaken impression that Mary's code is
> public domain.
> * I merge WidgetY with Mozilla code to release WidgetZZZ, under MPL,
> with portions under MIT.
> * Tim sues me for violating the NCCL license on the WidgetX code.

Wait, so George thinks Mary died more than 50 or 70 years ago, or
published her code before the year the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio
was founded?  Ok, so maybe George is a bit copyright-naive, but that
problem isn't specific to the NCCL; apparently people frequently try to
apply CC-BY-NC-SA to derivatives of works originally licensed as
CC-BY-SA [1].

No matter which copyleft licence you start with, if anyone in the chain
is copyright-naive enough to think they can apply an incompatible
licence to their derivative works, the same problem might arise in the
end.

At least with code, if there's a brief comment at the top of each file
about the applicable licence, it takes a bit more effort to go around
changing all those comments, but apparently even that sometimes happens
already, with existing licences [2].

As far as I can see, the only added risk with the NCCL is that you can't
sue people who deliberately go around removing references to the
licence, perhaps in an effort to deceive people about the licence that
applies to their derivative works.  But how likely is this to happen in
practice?  Any more likely than that Goldman Sachs would do the same to
something licensed under an existing free software licence, and not be
sued for it?

The GPL (or any other free software licence) allows people to charge a
fee in exchange for copies of the software, but people very rarely do,
because others are always free to distribute the same software free of
charge.  Likewise, the NCCL allows people to distribute copies of the
software without the licence attached, but I suspect that people very
rarely would, because if there's demand for explicitly and accurately
licensed copies of the software (which there will be among people who
aren't copyright-naive, if the software is popular), then others are
always free to supply such copies.

> Based on Tim's explanation of the NCCL, I would neither use it for my
> own code, nor would I be willing to use any code licensed under it.

Just to be clear, do you mean you wouldn't even use software licensed
under the NCCL?  Or that you wouldn't contribute code to NCCL-licensed
projects?  Or just that you wouldn't incorporate NCCL-covered code into
other projects?

Tim
<><

[1] http://questioncopyright.org/CC-branding-confusion
[2] http://tinyurl.com/pjn6csg