Hacker News Reader

Comment by lucideer | Hacker News Reader

Yeah the license self-refers as "copyleft" (an unregulated term afaik), and they have been very careful to avoid usage of the term "open source" rather preferring to say things like "the source is open".

Regulated or not the use of "copyleft" still seems deliberately misleading to me - I don't think the restrictions you've listed are in line with the intent of the copyleft movement.

View on HN

While "copyleft" is just a word like any other word, and subject to the same descriptivist drift as any other, in this case it is a specific word coined by a specific org, with a pretty specific definition. One that this license does not meet.

Frankly, copyleft is MORE permissive than generic bullshit weasely term "open source" (thanks to corp-friendly ESR). The fact they try to avoid using "open source" but willingly use the more "free as in freedom" word "copyleft" is a bit distressing.

I'm tired of this whole "shared source" movement, it's disingenuous, and ruins the spirit of actual open source (let alone "copyleft").

Boo on Winamp. Shame. I'm still using 5.666 until I die. I won't use their newer stuff, because it's clear they're not doing it with love but just trying to find another captive market of nostalgia nerds.

Copyleft just means you lose license privileges and revert to unlicensed copyright rules when violating its terms. There's no reason you can't use that principle in a more restrictive way than GPL.

That's not at all what copyleft means.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/copyleft.en.html

That's the FSFs spin. Ultimately GPL is a promise not to pursue an entity for copyright violation without the need for a signed contract. That promise is revoked when you disobey the copyleft.

> That's the FSFs spin

This implies your take on copyleft is an adversarial one, in which case implying your definition is canonical is disingenuous.

While I did make the point that "copyleft" is not a protected term & therefore can have many definitions, I've never heard your definition & it's certainly not the widely accepted one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com