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

Thu Aug 6 05:09:09 UTC 2015

On Tue, 2015-08-04 at 10:18 +0200, Carlo wrote:
> On 04/08/2015 03:05, Tim Makarios wrote:
> > 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.

Are you talking about the simplicity of the language of the licence?
The NCCL inherits much of that from the SimPL, which, at around 300
words, was, in fact, written by a professor of law at the University of
Washington, is supposed to be equivalent to the GPL v2 [1], and has been
approved by the OSI.  The text of CC0 is significantly longer, reaching
nearly 1000 words [2].

But actually, when I wrote the paragraph you quoted above, I didn't have
the simplicity of language in mind; what I had in mind was the
simplicity of the requirements that the NCCL imposes on the licensee.
Or rather, "requirement", singular, since my intention is that the
*only* requirement is the copyleft condition.

Yes, by this standard, it isn't as simple as CC0, but it is simpler than
any other copyleft licence I'm aware of, or can imagine.

> 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.

The GPL doesn't require that software it covers is distributed free of
charge.  But we see that in practice, its effect *is* almost always to
ensure costless access to such software.  Why?  Because the GPL creates
a free market in the distribution of the software, and in a perfectly
competitive market, the price tends towards the marginal cost, which,
thanks to the internet, is effectively zero.  I believe that this
economic principle is widely accepted by micro-economists belonging to
various political traditions; even the author of The dotCommunist
Manifesto has been known to refer to it [3].

Likewise, I believe that despite not requiring that the source code of
derivative works is published, the NCCL will in practice ensure that
source code of published derivative works is almost always published,
simply by ensuring a free market in the source code.  Sure, it's
*possible* that sometimes the author of a derivative work might withhold
the source code, forcing others to reverse engineer it before the source
code is freely distributed; but it's also *possible* that under the GPL,
authors of derivative works might sometimes insist on payment in
exchange for copies of their derivative works.  But for those authors,
such a strategy is roughly equivalent to a reverse bounty strategy [4],
because as soon as several people have copies of the software, they'll
bid each other's distribution price down to the marginal cost, which is
probably zero.

In a reverse bounty strategy, the bounty that can be obtained is bounded
by the value of the software to be provided, and also by the cost of
having someone else implement equivalent software.  But in a situation
where the binary is already available under a copyleft licence, the
bounty that can be obtained in exchange for the source code is bounded
not only by the value of the source code and by the cost of having
someone else write equivalent source code, but also by the cost of
reverse engineering the binary.

If reverse bounties are relatively rare for open source software (which
I believe they are, compared to how much open source software is simply
released free of charge), this analysis suggests that they will be even
rarer for the source code of derivative works of open source software
whose copyleft licences don't require the source code to be made
available.

What does the developer of a derivative work have to gain by withholding
the source code?  Perhaps a one-off bounty (if they're lucky, and people
don't simply exercise their right to reverse engineer the binary), after
which the source code will be widely available free of charge anyway.
What do they have to gain by releasing the source code?  More time with
more people having the opportunity to find and fix bugs, and maybe even
contribute new features.

But maybe my analysis is wrong.  Do you see a flaw in it?  Or have you
seen software released under copyleft licences that don't require the
source code of derivative works to be published?  Maybe someone has
tried releasing software under CC-BY-SA?  If so, how did it turn out?

Tim
<><

[1] http://www.law.washington.edu/Casrip/Research/Default.aspx
[2] http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode
[3] http://tinyurl.com/ojkdtqu
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_bounty