Good question.
Ideally it should grant you the 4 freedoms as long as you give the same 4 #freedoms to every user that directly or indirectly interact with the #software. 😇
And it should be shorter.
Something like "Any direct or indirect use of this code, its documentation and any transformation of them is a gift to benefit the whole #humanity. You can use them as such."
In other terms: this is a fucking gift to anyone want to donate back to anyone who want to donate back.
@Shamar @kaniini if the copyright system made it possible to ban clean room reimplementations, you would not have a lot of the GNU utils, which are cleanroom reimplementations of closed-source tools from different UNIXes.
Patent laws are being used for this exact purpose these days. That's why they're considered evil by the FLOSS community.
Be careful what you wish for.
The whole Oracle vs. Google thing is going that way, because it's both free software, and Oracle is suing Google over API cloning, i.e. over reimplementation of library stuff.
And the supreme court already said that APIs are under copyright, and the next awful decision is that it isn't fair use, either.
I hope the third decision of the lower court will be that the damage is $0, because it was free software, anyways… but we already are in deep shit.
> Second you can compile the software into another language with a private compiler and relicense the new code in another way.
I do not think this is true. It would still be a work based on your copyrighted code, automatic translation from one language to another doesn't make copyright magically go away.
@Shamar @kaniini but then you're advocating licensing*ideas*, not software.
And that is inherently dangerous. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents#Criticism
@Shamar @kaniini and API stuff is handled by "13. Remote Network Interaction; Use with the GNU General Public License."
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html
Read carefully.
"The terms of this License will continue to apply to the part which is the covered work".
You have two programs, A and G. A is licensed under AGPL, G is licensed under GPL3.
Now, you create a new piece of software, or a package, out of these two. Let's call it Z.
A keeps being covered by AGPL, and so is anything that is copied from A into Z.
G is still covered by GPL3, and so is anything copied from G to Z.
@kaniini @Shamar now, depending on what Z is and how tightly stuff intermingles, you might or might not be able to keep the licensing for A-in-Z and G-in-Z separate or not.
If it's a package, you *could* keep them separate.
If it's a single piece of code, in practice the whole thing is AGPL.
Bot there is no way to suddenly relicense AGPL code into GPL3.
Disclaimer: IANAL, but I used to do trainings on copyright and libre licensing of software and art.
@Wolf480pl @Shamar @kaniini because what we really need is yet another, new, not tested in court, not well understood imaginary property regime complicating things in the software licensing landscape.
Sure.
@Shamar @kaniini yes, this is exactly what AGPL says.
But in a way that would hold up in court.
It's kinda as if a lawyer said "I need software that does exactly what GIMP does. Only the code has to be shorter. Something like 'user draws -> software saves'".
If you want to write a software license like this though, go ahead. I will keep using AGPL for my stuff, since it's written and vetted by people who know how the legal system works. Which is relevant, I feel.