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Episode 0x09: Copyleft, -or-later, and Basics of Compatibility
15 February 2011
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oggmp3Summary
Bradley and Karen discuss types of copyleft generally and introduce the basics of license compatibility and -or-later clauses.
This show was released on Tuesday 15 February 2011; its running time is 00:41:57.
Show Notes
Segment 0 (00:38)
- This show discusses copyleft and basic issues of license compatibility (04:09)
- Karen mentioned an episode of the old Software Freedom Law Show, Episode 0x08, where Bradley and Karen discussed selecting a FLOSS license and what the various options are. (04:45)
- license compatibility 06:28
- Bradley incorrectly said that the original Emacs license didn't
have the word
General
in it. However, the other explanations appear to be correct. There's a useful history page that someone wrote about the history of GPL. It appears the non-general GNU copylefts existed from 1984-1988. (06:57) - Karen noted that the Library GPL was renamed to the Lesser GPL which happened in 1999. (09:30)
- Bradley mentioned that when he and RMS worked on the GNU Classpath Exception, Bradley suggested it be called the Least GPL. (10:38)
- GPL doesn't have a choice of law clause. If another copyleft does, it surely is incompatible with the GPL. (14:17)
- AGPLv3
§ 13 and GPLv3 §
13 explicitly make themselves compatibility with each other, which
Bradley calls
compatibility by fiat
. (15:40) - Karen mentioned that the Mozilla Public License § 13 has a section about multiple licensed code (16:50).
- Bradley mentioned that Mozilla Firefox uses a combinatorial license: (GPL|LGPL|MPL), which is a disjunctive tri-license. (19:00).
- Bradley mentioned that the old Software Freedom Law Show Episode 0x17 discussed compatibility of permissively licensed software and copylefted software. (20:22)
- Apache Software License 2.0 was likely the first FLOSS license to have an explicit patent licensing provision (23:40)
- Bradley and Karen discussed the fact that -only vs. -or-later are options with the GPL, while they are not with other copylefts, such as CC-By-SA. (30:11)
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