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by ElevenLathe 1300 days ago
Not to sidestep the discussion because of your metaphor, but I just don't understand it. What Free Software is there that doesn't rely on copyleft? Just public domain stuff? If so, you're talking about such a fringe part of the Free Software movement that it basically doesn't exist except by accident (when people forget to license their software) and is even more extreme than RMS, who is usually considered the absolute far "left" of Free Software as a movement. Is that really the analogy you're trying to draw with Earning to Give?
3 comments
rcoveson 1300 days ago
Copyleft[0] accounts for a significant but minority fraction of free software. The GPL is a Copyleft licesense, but the MIT and Apache licenses (which together might account for a majority of free software) are not. Copyleft refers to the restriction that derivative works also be subject to the same Copyleft terms; it's the "infectious" nature of the license.

Having any license requirements at all, e.g. attribution, inclusion of license alongside distributed copies, etc. does not make the license Copyleft.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft

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thethirdone 1300 days ago
The MIT license is probably the most notable non-copyleft open source license. There is a ton of MIT licensed code out there so it is not a fringe part of Free Software.
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leereeves 1300 days ago
Copyleft is the requirement that derivative works carry the same license ("share-alike"). There's a lot of Free Software that doesn't have that requirement.
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ElevenLathe 1300 days ago
Can you name one? A sibling comment says the MIT license is one, but that requires derivative works to include the license, so it seems also to be copyleft under this definition. What is the point of releasing software with a license that says you can strip the license off of it and do whatever you want? This is effectively the same as releasing it to the public domain.
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leereeves 1300 days ago
The MIT license requires attribution (in the form of the copyright notice and the license file) for the MIT licensed code.

But it doesn't require that other code in the project be released under the MIT license (or even released at all), which is what copyleft would do.

It's pretty close to releasing it to the public domain, and the point of that is that it's actually really hard to release something to the public domain worldwide. Just saying something like "I release this code to the public domain" doesn't have the same effect in every country.

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ElevenLathe 1300 days ago
Interesting, I've never encountered this extremely narrow definition of copyleft. Thanks for explaining.
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ben_w 1300 days ago
MIT isn’t copyleft.

If you want to include an MIT licensed work in your project, your obligation is to say “I am using $foo, here is a copy of the MIT licence: $text”, and that’s it.

If you want to include a GPL licensed work in your project, your project is now also GPL licensed, and you are obliged to make the source available.

(I’m not a lawyer etc.)

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