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

[Carlo]

On 04/08/2015 03:05, Tim Makarios wrote:
>> you are proposing a radical new thing.  And you have
>> > yet, as far as I've seen, to state any real need for it.
> I'm not the first person to want a copyleft version of something like
> CC0 or WTFPL [2], and I probably won't be the last.  I don't claim that
> everyone will suddenly want to switch to NCCL, but I do think there will
> be some people who will at least sometimes prefer it either for reasons
> of principle or merely for the sake of simplicity.
>

This is a red herring to me.

You cannot have the CC0 equivalent of a copyleft license, just as you
cannot have the cake and eat it.

A CC0 is a total waiver of any possible right in something. It's simple
because it's unconditional. A copyleft license is a *conditional*
license, and the conditions are strong that a simple liberal license.
Since the conditions must be written down as rules in natural language,
and natural language is inefficient in writing rules -- yet it's the
best option so far -- you need long and complicated text to make the
rules and exceptions.

It is utterly naive thinking that some of the best legal minds in the
world have come to the GPL v.3 just because they could not write
something simpler than that, so somebody without legal legal training
can do better. I'm sorry, but I keeping hearing this nonsense.

Writing conditions is difficult, writing them so that they are not
easily exploited is even more difficult and have them working in the
many different conceivable scenarios, present and future ones, is nearly
impossible.

So you can dislike copyleft, and many do, and many advocate against it,
because they prefer liberty over control, so they accept the odds that
code will be misused, or simply don't care, for the benefit of having
simple and straightforward licenses and larger commons because of lack
of licensing incompatibilities. Others think different. But it's always
a trade off. You can't have both copyleft *and* simplicity, you can only
have a better noise/signal ratio.

Sorry for the rant, but I think we should set the record straight here.

Carlo

PS: I have expressed an opinion in the past that any copyleft license
which do not ensure access to modified source code is almost totally
moot, at best it's a shareware license. The same applies here.