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> The toxicity of this business model has only become apparent in hindsight. I'm glad that Bradley is drawing critical attention to this issue. > efforts to d
by yarrel 7y ago
> The toxicity of this business model has only become apparent in hindsight.
I'm glad that Bradley is drawing critical attention to this issue.
> efforts to draft even more restrictive software copyleft licenses
A non-free "copyleft" license is not worthy of the name and is a problem because it is non-free, not because of "copyleft".
> The clause still needs work
The license needs work,it seems to treat copyleft as a form of punishment for authors to be tolerated for a while rather than as a strategy to permanently protect the freedom of all software users.
> a basic approach to incorporating similar copyleft equality clauses into written exceptions for existing copyleft licenses, such as the Affero GPL
These clauses can and will be removed by downstream users for any alterations or additions they make to the software in order to provide it to their cloud-based users. This will redouble the downstream use dynamics that VC-funded "open source" projects, some of the heaviest users of abusive CLAs, whine about.
- kazinator 7y agoDownstream users cannot remove clauses put in place by the copyright holder, even for alterations that they make, because those are derived works. A pure addition that you make to a copylefted program is your copyright; you have to license it in a way which is compatible with that program, but otherwise it can be anything. E.g. you can add 2-Clause-BSD-licensed code to a GPL-ed program and then redistribute that to your own downstream users. The GPL still applies to the thing as a whole; users can use just your portion alone under its BSD license (like borrow the code into another program).