On Wed, May 25, 2022 at 07:05:31PM +0000, Bird, Tim wrote:
-----Original Message----- From: Luis Chamberlain mcgrof@infradead.org On Behalf Of Luis Chamberlain
On Wed, May 25, 2022 at 05:05:54PM +0000, Bird, Tim wrote:
I know it's being submitted as an OR, but I question the value of introducing another license into the kernel's licensing mix.
I agree that we want to keep the number of licenses as small as possible but we cannot really dictate which dual licensing options a submitter selects unless the license is GPL-2.0-only incompatible, which copyleft-next is not.
Um, yes we can dictate that.
The statement about us not being able to dictate which dual licensing options a submitter selects does not actually come from me, Thomas noted this [0].
[0] https://lkml.kernel.org/r/87fsl1iqg0.ffs@tglx
There were good reasons that the original BSD dual-licenses were allowed.
I helped spearhead some of that effort.
Those same reasons don't apply here.
Correct, and I noted my own reasoning for now dual licensing with copyleft-next, which you seem to be disregarding?
Each license added to the kernel (even when added as an OR), requires additional legal analysis.
And I noted in my cover letter that copyleft-next-0.3.1 has been found to be to be GPLv2 compatible by three attorneys at SUSE and Redhat [1], but to err on the side of caution we simply recommend to always use the "OR" language for this license [2].
[1] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20170516232702.GL17314@wotan.suse.de/ [2] https://lkml.kernel.org/r/1495234558.7848.122.camel@linux.intel.com
And here's the thing. The copyleft-next license has a number of legal issues that make it problematic.
You say number of legal issues.
Not the least of which are that some of its terms are dependent on external situations that can change over time, in a matter that is uncontrolled by either the licensor or the licensee. In order to determine what terms are effective, you have to know when the license was granted, and what the FSF and OSI approved licenses were at various points in time. You literally have to use the Internet Archive wayback machine, and do a bunch of research, to interpret the license terms. It is not, as currently constructed, a good license, due to this lack of legal clarity.
But the above seems to indicate one technical pain point in so far as two sections:
4. Condition Against Further Restrictions; Inbound License Compatibility 7. Nullification of Copyleft/Proprietary Dual Licensing
If you are going to offer to pay for an alternative proprietary licensing, I'm sure you can do the work.
And if in so far as clause 4 is concerned, yeah I think wayback machine is a sensible solution. Good idea, seems like we have that covered since 1999 [3].
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://opensource.org/licenses
Luis