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Non-FSF Copyleft Usage

24 Mar 2021

The Free Software Foundation has decided they'd rather hang out with a sex pest than have an ounce of credibility, so fuck em. Let's look at the copyleft licenses they didn't write and see how they're used.

I'll be using the Blue Oak Council's list of copyleft licenses here, because I don't know of a good other way to find specifically copyleft licenses. I'll be searching GitHub for `filename:LICENSE "<some snippet from the license>"` or checking Wikipedia and then seeing if anything notable turns up.

Blue Oak Council's list of copyleft licenses

Maximal Copyleft

its own list of users

basically it

Network Copyleft

well,

and

GitHub can't find any usage of it!

Strong Copyleft

Weak Copyleft

popular with enterprisey bullshit because it started at Sun

even less usage

a lot of other non-enterprise-bullshit (mostly Java) stuff apparently

lots of users

not really widely used

apparently it's the older, worse CDDL

Summary

for maximal copyleft ("must publish source, even if only changing for internal use"), Parity is probably the most promising future license.

Parity

for network copyleft ("must offer source to users even across a network"), the European Union Public License is already seeing some adoption.

European Union Public License

for "strong" copyleft ("must offer source to users even if just linking as a library"), there are no good options because the GPL has been the only game in town for ages.

for "weak" copyleft ("must offer source to users"), the Mozilla Public License looks like it has a good chance of continuing to exist and be used by actual projeccts for a nice long while.

Mozilla Public License