The license term smorgasbord: copyleft, share-alike, reciprocal, viral, or hereditary?

I microblogged (diaspora, identica, twitter) the following statement a few weeks ago:

First new year’s resolution, 10 days late: I will use ‘hereditary license’ any time I am tempted to say ‘viral license.’

Surprisingly, this generated quite a few responses (on identica and elsewhere)- some people liked it, but many people had their own alternative to propose. So here are some longer-form thoughts.

There are four primary options that I am aware of when trying to find a one-word term for open source licenses that in some way compel distributors to also distribute code- i.e., the licenses called “copyleft” by those of us who have spent too much time with this stuff. The terms:

• Copyleft: This is the common name when speaking to other people experienced in open source, so it’s obviously the first choice when you know your audience has at least some experience in open source. But to an audience not already involved in open source (the only time I’m ever even vaguely “tempted to say viral”), the phrase is completely non-obvious. It has zero evident meaning. In fact, it can actively confuse: it could mean the reverse of copyright, which to most people probably means “no license” or anti-copyright altogether. So it’s really not a good word to use for audiences who aren’t familiar with open source- which is to say, most audiences.
• Viral: This is another old standby. Traditionally, the objection to this term has been that it is perjorative: no one likes viruses, so ‘viral’ is often seen as (and sometimes is) a deliberate attempt to frame copyleft licenses as inherently bad. That objection is certainly accurate, but I think there is another problem with this word: it implies that, like a virus, copyleft can spread to someone without their active involvement; you can “catch” it from the digital equivalent of being in the same room with someone, or not washing your hands. This isn’t the case – there must be a strong relationship between the copylefted code and the other code that might be required to be shared. This, to me, is where “viral” really fails to communicate. It makes people think that a copyleft is something that might “happen to them” instead of it being something that they have to be actively involved with.
• Share-alike (or the related word “reciprocal”): Oddly, neither of these is used much outside of the Creative Commons world. Neither of these are bad terms: they are reasonably value-neutral, and they both imply that there must be an actively chosen relationship between the parties, which I think is important. But to me they don’t capture the why of the relationship; it makes it sound like there might be a choice in the matter, or something you do because you’re a nice guy.
• Hereditary: Richard Fontana traced this back to at least 2004, so it isn’t new, but without doubt this is the least used of the various terms I’m discussing here. At least for the moment, though, and for general audiences, I’m leaning towards thinking it is the best option. First, it implies that there has to be a real, derivative relationship between the two codebases; it can’t just happen at random (like viral implies). Second, it also implies that once the relationship exists, further licensing isn’t a choice- you must pass it on to the next folks who “inherit” from you. (Share-alike/reciprocal might imply that you do this because you’re a nice guy, which isn’t the case, or that you do it back to the original sharer- which also isn’t necessarily the case.) The analogy obviously isn’t perfect, most notably because a mere redistributor who hasn’t created a derivative work that “inherits” from the parent work is still bound by the license. But I think on balance that it has the fewest tradeoffs.

So there you go, for the dozen people who asked, and the hundreds, nay billions more who don’t care :)

Syndicated 2012-02-03 02:14:21 from Luis Villa » Blog Posts

Nominated for OpenSource.com People’s Choice Award

Based on my series of MPL posts for opensource.com, I’ve been nominated for a “people’s choice award” as a top contributor to opensource.com. It’s a nice little honor. That said, there are lots of folks on the list of nominees who have written and thought far more than I have this year- so you should go check out the list and vote for one of them instead :)

Syndicated 2012-01-24 20:42:15 from Luis Villa » Blog Posts

Personal MPL acknowledgments

This morning I hit publish on the announcement of MPL 2.0, finishing a two year process. The official announcement had a number of acknowledgements for the many people who helped out along the way, but I wanted to take to my personal blog to add a few personal notes.

“thank you note for every language,” by woodleywonderworks, used under CC-BY 2.0.First, Gerv Markham. Gerv has in many ways been central to Mozilla’s open source mission for a while, and it would have been easy for him to feel threatened when I parachuted in and began working on the license. Instead, he’s been helpful, patient, and constructive- everything you’d want from a co-worker and team member.

Second, Brett Smith, of the FSF: Brett has brought a very professional, constructive approach to working with me on the license. Without his dedication and patience the new GPL compatibility approach would not have succeeded. Aaron Williamson and James Vasile at SFLC and Richard Fontana at Red Hat were also instrumental in this, and again gave freely of their time when they didn’t have to. They also kept a straight face when I suggested the new approach, which probably helped a great deal in getting it done. :)

Third, Karen Copenhaver and Heather Meeker were incredible pros in helping push out the critical betas- they helped me go through the important issues and get the language right, in a way only people with decades of experience can do. That they were willing to give their time to Mozilla and to me was incredibly generous- most partners at major law firms aren’t willing to take those steps. And I’m not just saying that because Heather is now my boss. ;)

Finally, and most importantly, Mitchell Baker and Harvey Anderson: Mitchell and Harvey took a gamble when they brought me on board this project- one they didn’t need to do. This has been their baby for the past ten years, and they could have done this work themselves, or just let the license continue to age gracefully (as it was doing). Not only did they give me this terrific opportunity, they then opened up their calendars and their minds to me. As a result, I’ve had a terrific educational experience, learning the nooks and crannies of the license as well as lots about how to draft a document that stands the test of time. (Rumor has it that Mitchell wrote the original in a month, which I still find mind-boggling, and I can confirm that the text is still burned into her brain in high resolution.) It has really been an honor and a privilege for me to be involved with them and in this process, so I’m deeply thankful for their encouragement and invitation to participate.

I’ll probably write more here soon about the license and the process,  but thanking people was really at the top of my priority list.

Syndicated 2012-01-03 18:14:01 from Luis Villa » Blog Posts

A note on 2011

The best thing I did for myself in 2011 was to get back on a bicycle after not being on one for 15+ years, and after never actually being comfortable on one. I’m not going to be racing any time soon, but I now really look forward to a bike ride as part of the average weekend and even the average vacation.

Yesterday was a nice punctuation mark to that, featuring a long ride down to the ocean, a great view, and a very satisfying fish and chips.

I am definitely enjoying some time out of the office and looking forward to a great 2012- hope my friends are too. Now I just need to figure out what life improvement can trump “get back on a bike.” Suggestions welcome :)

Syndicated 2011-12-29 18:31:55 from Luis Villa » Blog Posts

San Francisco Recommended Reading

When I moved into San Francisco, I asked some folks about books I should read to get a sense of the history of the city. Here’s a sampling of the books that I’ve read since then, gathered in one place for the next time someone asks me the question. I’m still open to more suggestions, and suggestions need not be about the city as a whole- for example, my favorite book about New York was in large part about traffic and my favorite book about Boston was about the river.

Actually publishing this post, moons after writing it, is mostly in honor of today’s spectacular weather and my first ever bike ride across the Golden Gate. (And yes, the photo is cliched and I don’t care ;)

Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin: Gray Brechin: This book opens with a slightly bizarre conspiracy theory about the role of mining in history, and keeps going with a lot of implied “the rich are trying to keep us down” without much evidence. Not that the folks he’s chronicling are particularly nice folks, but that’s easy enough to prove without going off the deep end about it. Despite this unfortunate tendency, this book has lots of great stories and background about how the San Francisco power brokers of the late 19th century interrelated with the city, the state, and the rest of the country, including some great background on the history of water and mining in the region. Recommended reading for someone trying to get a grasp on the early history of SF, albeit to be taken with a side order of salt.

Golden Gate: The Life and Times of America’s Greatest Bridge, Kevin Starr: Starr is a great historian (his more serious California history books are terrific), and this book has a lot of great stories. Unfortunately, it also has a lot of filler to make it “book length.” (In the future, books like this will be about 1/2 the length and sold purely as ebooks.) I recommend it, if you’re interested in the bridge and have time to wade through some fairly purple and extraneous prose. If you’re just looking for any one particular book about the city, this one isn’t it.

Making San Francisco American: Cultural Frontiers in the Urban West, 1846-1906, Barbara Berglund: This started as a PhD thesis, and reads like one. But if you’re the kind of person who can plunge through that (and I am), it’s a brilliant book, explaining how the racially mixed and roughly egalitarian culture of mining-era SF was gradually molded into something acceptable to “cultured” Americans – both to the nouveau riche of the West who wanted to build a city acceptable to the East, and to those from the East who were flooding into SF. Really fascinating read, and I think has some lessons applicable to the “uncultured” programmers who have to constantly resist cultural change imposed by more “refined” outsiders- still an ongoing theme in SF.

The Barbary Plague: The Black Death in Victorian San Francisco by Marilyn Chase: This book explores the history of the entry of the bubonic plague into the Americas via San Francisco. It’s a lighter and more thematically consistent book than Making San Francisco American, but covers overlapping time periods and explores some similar themes, like early anti-Chinese racism, and the relationship of early San Francisco with the Eastern US. If you’re looking for something less serious, and not at all about software, this is definitely the one book in this list to read.

Vanished Waters: A History of San Francisco’s Mission Bay, Nancy Olmsted: I live on land reclaimed from Mission Bay, so this has resonance for me that it probably won’t for others. But I think it’s a brilliant, brief book that anyone who lives near modern Caltrain should benefit from reading, since it will help you understand the geography and history of your own neighborhood.

What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer, by John Markoff; and Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128, AnnaLee Saxenian: I think of these as a pair, because while very different books they are also both about the culture of computing innovation and networking in the Valley. Dormouse is really very anecdotal (a little birdie once told me that even the author admits it was basically an excuse to string together a bunch of great stories he’d heard over the years), but they are great anecdotes and give a lot to chew over, especially in light of the success of the iPhone and iPad after the writing of the book, and the continued tension between personalized and centralized computing. Regional Advantage is an even older book, but critical to understanding the larger, structural causes of Silicon Valley’s success, showing that it was increased interpersonal and intercorporate sharing that made Silicon Valley continue to succeed after the shocks of the ’80s hammered both Silicon Valley and Boston’s Route 128.

Reclaiming San Francisco: Brook, Carlsson, and Peters: Not actually read yet, but am excited to find time for it. It’s a series of essays.

Syndicated 2011-09-19 02:21:11 from Luis Villa » Blog Posts