Re: licensing

[Lyno Sullivan]

At 10:21 PM 5/10/99 -0700, Kevin Shrieve wrote:
>Would it be off-topic to ask what thoughts people have on licensing the art
>they make?

On the application of copyleft to all works that may be copyrighted, I have reduced my thinking to the essentials.

There are two copyleft distinctions that are important to me.  I want a copyleft license (or a family of licenses) that lets me specify two characteristics: attribution and affiliation.

Attribution is the requirement that a derived or composite work, based on my work, must preserve a proper attribution trail back to me, as the original creator of the work.

Affiliation is the requirement that my work can only affiliate with works that are copylefted.  Further, it is the requirement that composite and derived works must preserve copyleft.  I tend to think of this as the distinction between the GPL and LGPL.  The GPL assures "domain closure", in that GPL'd works may only affiliate with copylefted works.  The LGPL is a "patch" license that permits a work to affiliate with non-copylefted works.

Were I to permute the copyleft licenses according to these two copyleft distinctions I would get four licenses.  Assuming that the GPL and the LGPL both embody the requirement for attribution, the four licenses would be

GPL = copyleft + attribution + domain closure
LGPL = copyleft + attribution - domain closure
WGPL = copyleft - attribution + domain closure
WLGPL = copyleft - attribution - domain closure

MY PREFERENCE AMONG THESE LICENSES

Among these licenses I would prefer the WGPL because I value most highly the proliferation of copyleft and, in order to further that proliferation, seek to grant an additional freedom, namely, the freedom to preserve copyleft free of the encumbrance of having to preserve the attribution trail.

--
Copyright(c) 1999 Lyno Sullivan; this work is free and may
be copied, modified and distributed under the GNU Library
General Public License (LGPL) and it comes with absolutely
NO WARRANTY <http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lgpl.html>;
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