Bjorn Reese wrote:
> Frank Hecker wrote:
>
> > A more interesting question is, are any of those GPL-compatible licenses
> > copyleft licenses? I have never seen this stated explicitly, but I
>
> Most people have a one-dimensional concept about licenses. They only
> rate license according to their openness. However, there is an equally
> important dimension, namely cooperation. See for example
>
> http://devlinux.org/devLicense.html
>
> The problem with GPL is that its strongly defensive posture makes it
> a very uncooperative license. Interestingly, its tactics backfires as
> your question indicates. In an attempt to guard copyleft by all means
> possible, it "kills" (i.e. refuses to cooperate with) any similar
> attempts. This forces any compatible license to have a much weaker
> notion of copyleft.
>
> As an example, we have been using MPL for another project, and have
> naturally received requests, similar to those that the Mozilla
> community have received, about re-distributing the project under a
> GPL-compatible license. The disjunctive MPL/GPL dual-license was
> considered and rejected because it would allow the project to become
> GPL-only, which is would be unacceptable to us (the project is used
> in several commercial applications). Instead we opted for a MPL/BSD
> dual-license. This weakens the copyleft of the project, which is the
> the opposite effect of what the FSF wants to achieve -- and the irony
> of it all is, that GPL was the direct cause of this shift.
Do you mind posting the dual MPL/BSD you used .... the more I learn about GPL
this seems quite attractive
>
>
> > suspect that the only copyleft licenses that the FSF would ever consider
> > compatible with the GPL are the GPL itself, LGPL, dual licenses
> > involving the GPL or LGPL, and minor variants of the preceding licenses.
>
> I tend to agree. The underlying mechanism seems to be that a license
> will only be GPL-compatible if it (1) does not prevent the terms of
> GPL to apply, or (2) it can be transformed into GPL.
>
> Many people who uses the LGPL, seems to be woefully unaware about
> section 3, which allows anybody, at any time, in any kind of weather,
> to transform LGPL into GPL. As somebody once said, the road to GPL is
> a one-way street.
>
> > There have been at least two attempts to create non-GPL copyleft
> > licenses "from scratch", the NPL/MPL and the Jabber Open Source License,
> > and the FSF considers both of them incompatible with the GPL.
>
> GPL does not promote copyleft, only "GPL copyleft".
