A bi-weekly discussion of legal, policy, and other issues in the open source and software freedom community (including occasional interviews) from Brooklyn, New York, USA. Presented by Karen Sandler and Bradley M. Kuhn.
https://faif.us/cast/
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)
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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.
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