Re: [autonomo.us] pumped

[Kuno Woudt]

Hello,

On 07/12/2013 03:13 AM, Mike Linksvayer wrote:
> Second, and much more widely noted, is the preference of
> (supposedly young, but I'm doubtful) web developers for permissive
> licenses. If true, this would make a permissive license all the more
> necessary to establish a standard, and hopefully contribute to
> non-obscurity among developers.

One possible reason (I've come to realize) for this is that a typical 
web application often depends on hundreds of third party libraries / 
modules [1], and no one wants to spend time figuring out if all of them 
have compatible licenses.

After running "npm install" on pump.io, you will end up with up 107 
third party modules in "node_modules".  It's just so much easier to pick 
a permissive license and not have to worry about the question whether 
your code is going to be derivative of any of those modules or have 
incompatible licenses.

If we want strong copyleft to be more popular with web developers one of 
the things we need to do is make sure this boundary is clear.  The 
license should only apply to the code the developer is shipping.  Third 
party libraries which are only mentioned in a machine-readable 
dependencies/requirements file and in import/require statements in the 
code should always be considered separate works.

Fontana's copyleft-next has I think a good solution to this in version 
0.3.0, see the "Derived Work" definition in the license text [2]. 
(Although that version still allows you to opt-out from this 
interpretation, which I think is a mistake :)

-- kuno / warp.

[1] ps, perl and node.js modules seem more granular than python and php. 
MediaGoblin for example probably "only" needs about 40 or 50 python 
libraries for its default install.

[2] 
https://gitorious.org/copyleft-next/copyleft-next/blobs/master/Releases/copyleft-next-0.3.0