johnsu01 ([info]johnsu01) wrote,
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At FOSDEM in February

I will be helping to represent the FSF at FOSDEM next month in Brussels. I'm speaking in the Legal Issues Devroom on Saturday 2012-02-04. The presentation is called "Is copyleft being framed?":

This short talk will address the following questions, to inspire discussion and contemplation about how we frame descriptions of the state of licensing in free software.

  • Numbers are increasingly being cited to show that the use of copyleft licenses, specifically the GPL, is declining. What do these numbers actually show, who is propagating them, and why? What do or might other numbers show?
  • Is the "percentage of free software projects which use copyleft licenses" a useful way to judge the success of copyleft? Does an increase in the percentage of projects using non-copyleft permissive licenses indicate a failure of copyleft?
  • As a small related case study, what role have the licensing terms of popular mobile application stores played in this debate, and how have those terms changed the frame of the discussion?

Let me know if you'll be there too!

Tags: fosdem, free software, fsf, gnu, gpl

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Anonymous

January 16 2012, 08:28:27 UTC 1 month ago

Alas, won't be at FOSDEM, although your "short talk" sounds *very* enticing.

Just one little nit: I don't like the meme of "more permissive" licenses vor BSD, MIT and alikes and "less permissive" for GPL.

They just are "differently permissive". Or would you consider a commercial license "more permissive" than GPL because it allows you to distribute derivative works -- even if you had to sign an NDA? (I guess Microsoft would).

I think this meme is being spread by folks who don't like the GPL.

[info]johnsu01

January 18 2012, 20:57:30 UTC 1 month ago

Out of curiosity, are you a native English speaker? I'm finding a lot of disagreement lately about what "permissive" implies, and some of the different viewpoints have come from non-native speakers. In typical American English it pretty clearly has negative connotations. Permissive parents, for example, let their kids get away with too much without discipline. But I can understand other views, since "permission" is generally seen as a good thing, and permissive stems from that.

What else could people use? "lax" has been suggested. Or the combination, "lax permissive".



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