a minimal copyleft
The following has little to do with Debian, but it is related to how
documentation should be licensed, which was discussed here recently.
I was recently asked to suggest a licence for some course material
(explanations, exercises, etc) that would allow people to adapt and
reuse the material and to benefit from other people's improvements and
additions without having to constantly ask permission from each other.
A brief notice referring to GPLv2 is a safe and simple possibility.
However:
* The GPL tells me to include a copy of the GPL, which is inconvenient
in the case of small works in hard copy, such as a handout for a
lecture, though I don't suppose anyone would sue me for referring to
the GPL and providing a copy on request.
* The compulsory change log is similarly inconvenient, though everyone
seems to ignore that part of the GPL anyway.
* Though it's generally a good thing that the GPL requires me to
provide source, this requirement gives less benefit in the case of
text and can have some unpleasant consequences. For example, if
someone makes a derived work from my GPL work and "typesets" it using
Microsoft Word and I want to distribute a modified version of that
derived work, then the other person can quite reasonably claim that
the "preferred form of the work for making modifications to it" is a
Microsoft Word document, which would be highly inconvenient for me.
In view of those disadvantages of the GPL I thought it worth at least
considering the alternative of composing my own copyleft licence
without the requirement to provide source and I came up with the
following minimalist formulation:
(L) Public Property: You may do anything you want with this work
provided that you inform all recipients that all derived works must
likewise be Public Property.
Note:
* I deliberately don't tell people to include a copy of the licence;
if the recipient doesn't understand English then I want them to
translate the message.
* Although this is intended to be a minimal copyleft licence, I don't
use the term "copyleft" because it is a pun that is hard to translate
into other languages.
* I put an L in a circle because L is the first letter of a Latin word
for "free" and P in a circle is already taken. Maybe one day it will
be as easy to copyleft something as it is to copyright something
today, perhaps by using such a symbol; I'm dreaming, of course.
If anyone knows of another very concise copyleft licence please let me
know as I'd like to compare.
Edmund
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