Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Shields up from xGPLs? #2

Open
ignoramous opened this issue Aug 16, 2021 · 4 comments
Open

Shields up from xGPLs? #2

ignoramous opened this issue Aug 16, 2021 · 4 comments

Comments

@ignoramous
Copy link

ignoramous commented Aug 16, 2021

As someone who previously used BSD-3 for my projects, I began to worry if tech geeks would take offence to it or not if I semi-automatically added content from other people's GPLv3 projects to them. So I created this licence instead.

GPLv3 is one among many aggressively copy-left licenses out there. That means, any content from GPLv3 in a non-GPL project makes everything else GPLv3 too. It is viral in that sense. One cannot, legally anyway, re-license it except for moving to an even stricter compatible copy-left (for ex, moving from LGPLv3 -> GPLv3; or GPLv3 to AGPLv3).

So, I am here (after a conversation with 1Hosts' badmojr) confused how Dandelicence shields from that? Thanks.

Disclosure: I co-develop a DNS content blocking app and service that uses both 1Hosts and adlift (through OISD).

@DandelionSprout
Copy link
Owner

According to the general idea behind Dandelicence, there are primarily 2 things in it that aim to guard against very hostile DMCA takedowns by GNU worshippers:

  1. The ability to designate paragraphs or individual repo files as having to be treated as if they were and still are xGPL / CC-SA / etc. (which ironically is not something that 1Hosts currently does. 😅)
  2. A general request to "Pwease don't take down my repo right away. I promise to credit you and/or remove those entries, depending on what you want me to do."

If you have more in-depth questions or worries, I can look into them sometime on Wednesday.

@ignoramous
Copy link
Author

ignoramous commented Aug 19, 2021

The ability to designate paragraphs or individual repo files as having to be treated as if they were and still are xGPL / CC-SA / etc. (which ironically is not something that 1Hosts currently does)

GPLv3 (and AGPLv3 even more so) prevents this. When one part of the code-base is xGPLv3 and it builds / is used by another part of the code-base that isn't xGPLv3; then the latter is automatically covered under xGPLv3, and it cannot be licensed any other way. That, in essence, is how copy-lefts work.

If you have more in-depth questions or worries

  1. There isn't a license that can escape GPLv3. If there was one, the Free Software Foundation would have plugged those loopholes too (like they did with TiVoization by introducing a more vague AGPLv3). I am not a lawyer, but from reading the license text, I do not think "Dandelicence" escapes GPLv3 in anyway at all. As such, you may want to rethink the use of this license.

  2. A word of caution: Well-known licenses are drafted by domain-expert lawyers because of the nature of copyright / liability / warranty laws across different jurisdictions of various nation states.

DandelionSprout added a commit that referenced this issue Aug 19, 2021
@MasterKia
Copy link

@DandelionSprout I added your list and license to uBO's Filter list licenses wiki and described it as:
attribution, good intent for brief description in the "Other licenses" column.

Is there something else you'd like to be added to the description?

@DandelionSprout
Copy link
Owner

I admit to be unsure whether "Attribution" would be the correct word to use, though there doesn't seem to be any uBO-included lists that use BSD-3 that we could compare with. So I guess "Attribution" should work well enough.

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Labels
None yet
Projects
None yet
Development

No branches or pull requests

3 participants