search

kemitchell / api-copyleft-license

an open source license that's copyleft for changes, additions, and wrappers, but permissive for applications
31 stars 4 forks source link

Copyleft scope as carve-out #4

Closed kemitchell closed 5 years ago

kemitchell commented 5 years ago

This work-in-progress pull requests stands for the idea to rewrite the copyleft scope rules in the general form

You have to contribute all work based on this software, except applications.

Instead of the current form:

You have to contribute changes, additions, and superstructure, but not applications.

Either way, the license faces two line-drawing problems.

The current form draws:

  1. What's the boundary between additions and applications?
  2. What's the boundary between applications and superstructure?

The form proposed in this PR instead draws:

  1. What's the boundary of all software covered by copyleft?
  2. What's the boundary around applications, the carve-out from that scope?
kemitchell commented 5 years ago

As a small, incidental benefit, this approach avoids the need to coin the term "superstructure".

kemitchell commented 5 years ago

This is essentially a refactoring. The license has to draw the same lines. The benefit now is that it's doing so in one place, for one concept: the applications that licensees don't have to contribute back.