Episode 0x09: Copyleft, -or-later, and Basics of Compatibility

Bradley and Karen
discuss types of copyleft generally and introduce the basics of license
compatibility and -or-later clauses.

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)

Send feedback and comments on the cast
to <[email protected]>.
You can keep in touch with Free as in Freedom on our IRC channel, #faif on irc.freenode.net, and
by following Conservancy on
identi.ca and and Twitter.

Free as in Freedom is produced by Dan Lynch
of danlynch.org.
Theme
music written and performed
by Mike Tarantino
with Charlie Paxson on drums.

The content
of this
audcast, and the accompanying show notes and music are licensed
under the Creative
Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 4.0 license (CC BY-SA 4.0).