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I always find it frustrating when people pontificate about how the GPL should work who have never done the hard work to enforce it (BTW, I'm always looking for volunteers who want to help in the really really boring work of enforcing the GPL, but I rarely get any takers once I start describing what the work entails). I've done and/or led more GPL enforcement than anyone on the planet, for more than a dozen different copylefted projects, and I've done it as a volunteer, as an employee of both FSF and Conservancy, and for GPLv2-only, GPLv3-or-later, and LGPLv2.1 works. While I love, as a purely intellectual exercise over a nice meal, to talk theory with people who only have a theoretical understanding, real world experience with the licenses is the center of drafting good copyleft licenses. The GPL might as well be the ISC license if its clauses are never enforced, so enforcement is really the litmus test on how the license is working and what changes are needed. If the author or anyone else would like to get involved with "field research" and help in Conservancy's enforcement efforts for Linux, Samba, BusyBox and other projects, I'm easily contactable. Anyway, I think what Christopher Price and others in this thread are really looking for is the copyleft-next project. It's Richard Fontana's project that's attempting to redo copyleft licensing from first principles and from (initially) a theoretical basis. I'm a fan of the project as I do think a "redrafting from ground up done in a community fashion" is a good idea to try in parallel to the existing functioning copylefts like GPL. But saying "GPL is broken, therefore we need a GPLv4" is not terribly helpful. GPL is on the verge of collapse not for most of the reasons pundits say it is, but because (a) it's widely violated, (b) few people are willing to enforce, (c) some of those who enforce won't follow community Principles when they do, and (d) there is heavy political opposition from wealthy corporations and trade-associations against those who do enforce, even when they commit to follow published community Principles. IMO, those are the biggest problems GPL has now, and I work every week to seek to solve those. Sure, having been involved with copyleft policy since the early 1990s, I keep a private bug list of GPLv3 (i.e., things I'd like to see in GPLv4). But, it's far from my top priority, and it shouldn't be the community's top priority, IMO, either. |