alt Hacker NewsSounds like we need a "forever open source" license.
A commitment that any significant derivative retain the original (or some later version) of the original license.
"Free to do whatever as long as it retains this license. A commitment that this license will not change, even by the original author".
No special cases, just a blanket license for all derivatives.
If it exists, what are the barriers to adoption? Why don't we all use it?
Replies
I’d suggest the GPL family without a CLA as an approximation of that intent.
> If it exists, what are the barriers to adoption? Why don't we all use it?
My theory is that people in general don’t care that much, or (particularly in the case of corporations) consider permissive licenses to be ”freer” than copyleft.
I'm really not a lawyer, but I'm skeptical that such a thing is even possible; is it legally possible to say that you as the copyright owner will never relicense something?
(What I'm given to understand does work is using a copyleft license and taking code from multiple parties without a CLA, because then relicensing requires all the copyright owners to agree, which for a large enough project is impractical.)
Maybe this makes more sense as a change to trademark law than a license thing. If a name OpenSourceProject has gotten popular due to being open source then I would say it's in the interest of the public to ensure that OpenSourceProject keeps referring to an open source project an isn't misappropriated for something else. It's a kind of bait and switch fraud that I think should be generally illegal. On the other hand I don't see why we should care about the creator not being allowed to re-license his own work as long as no one has been mislead about what they are getting.
> A commitment that this license will not change, even by the original author
Unless you’re entering into a contract with the project maintainer (which you’re not, if you’re just downloading or using it) then such a commitment means nothing.
Applying an open source license to your work means you’ve licensed other people to use it under those terms.
You can make all the commitments you want in the license, but it doesn’t actually commit you to keeping all future work open source as well under the law.
So you could write this license and make the commitment, but if you changed your mind later and decided not to open source future commits to the project that you made then nobody could stop you. Not unless you had entered into a contractual agreement with them and exchanged some consideration (money).