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DandelionSprout / Dandelicence

My attempt at creating an open-source licence that works on good faith, specifically crafted for adblock filterlist maintainers.
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Shields up from xGPLs? #2

Open ignoramous opened 3 years ago

ignoramous commented 3 years ago

As someone who previously used BSD-3 for my projects, I began to worry if tech geeks would take offence to it or not if I semi-automatically added content from other people's GPLv3 projects to them. So I created this licence instead.

GPLv3 is one among many aggressively copy-left licenses out there. That means, any content from GPLv3 in a non-GPL project makes everything else GPLv3 too. It is viral in that sense. One cannot, legally anyway, re-license it except for moving to an even stricter compatible copy-left (for ex, moving from LGPLv3 -> GPLv3; or GPLv3 to AGPLv3).

So, I am here (after a conversation with 1Hosts' badmojr) confused how Dandelicence shields from that? Thanks.

Disclosure: I co-develop a DNS content blocking app and service that uses both 1Hosts and adlift (through OISD).

DandelionSprout commented 3 years ago

According to the general idea behind Dandelicence, there are primarily 2 things in it that aim to guard against very hostile DMCA takedowns by GNU worshippers:

1) The ability to designate paragraphs or individual repo files as having to be treated as if they were and still are xGPL / CC-SA / etc. (which ironically is not something that 1Hosts currently does. 😅) 2) A general request to "Pwease don't take down my repo right away. I promise to credit you and/or remove those entries, depending on what you want me to do."

If you have more in-depth questions or worries, I can look into them sometime on Wednesday.

ignoramous commented 3 years ago

The ability to designate paragraphs or individual repo files as having to be treated as if they were and still are xGPL / CC-SA / etc. (which ironically is not something that 1Hosts currently does)

GPLv3 (and AGPLv3 even more so) prevents this. When one part of the code-base is xGPLv3 and it builds / is used by another part of the code-base that isn't xGPLv3; then the latter is automatically covered under xGPLv3, and it cannot be licensed any other way. That, in essence, is how copy-lefts work.

If you have more in-depth questions or worries

  1. There isn't a license that can escape GPLv3. If there was one, the Free Software Foundation would have plugged those loopholes too (like they did with TiVoization by introducing a more vague AGPLv3). I am not a lawyer, but from reading the license text, I do not think "Dandelicence" escapes GPLv3 in anyway at all. As such, you may want to rethink the use of this license.

  2. A word of caution: Well-known licenses are drafted by domain-expert lawyers because of the nature of copyright / liability / warranty laws across different jurisdictions of various nation states.

MasterKia commented 2 years ago

@DandelionSprout I added your list and license to uBO's Filter list licenses wiki and described it as: attribution, good intent for brief description in the "Other licenses" column.

Is there something else you'd like to be added to the description?

DandelionSprout commented 2 years ago

I admit to be unsure whether "Attribution" would be the correct word to use, though there doesn't seem to be any uBO-included lists that use BSD-3 that we could compare with. So I guess "Attribution" should work well enough.