Mike Linksvayer

Authored Comments

Hear, hear.

I think there's room for long-term improvement in apprehension, but that'll have to come from guidance outside of licenses as you suggest, and improvements in existing licenses in the most popular public domain->AGPLv3+ compatibility path, or aggressive compatibility from those out of it (such as MPL2 achieved) and new ones (such as the current copyleft-next draft).

It is nice that there are no fundamental-purpose incompatibilities among FLOSS licenses, unlike among CC licenses. This is a usability plus, even if not evident by examining individual licenses in isolation.

Note there is a possibility of a one-way CC-BY-SA-4.0->GPL compatibility mechanism. I think that'd be a very good thing long term, practically for things like games and hardware designs, and normatively for encouraging people outside the software world to consider and demand modifiable forms, and to collaborate more closely with FLOSS.

There's also the problem of incompatible and newish copyleft licenses targeted at databases and hardware designs...

I count 9 EUians and 9 USians among the names on http://fosdem.org/2012/schedule/track/legal_issues_devroom (but 1 of the EUians did not make it, and indeed all 4 organizers are USians).

I was there the entire time except for the opening. I missed the "behaved like they owned the place" feeling, but maybe I'm imperceptive or even was a small part of the problem (I was the last speaker, and a USian). Examples?

I think almost all of the speakers are more aligned with "free software" than "open source" (which I consider a hairsplitting divide anyway) but FSF dogmatism? Several of the talks contained significant criticism of the FSF.