Copyleft adoption curves: what drove adoption then (or now?)
By
Luis Villa
Copyleft adoption has changed significantly over time, for better and for worse. This talk will survey the many factors that drive adoption, with particular focus on GPL v2 and Affero GPL v3. While some factors are obvious and reasonably well-understood (particularly the shift towards SaaS economics) many other nuanced factors play in as well.
Monday 10:30 a.m.–11 a.m.
Copyleft adoption has changed significantly over time, both slowly increasing (with a peak in the early 2000s) and slowly decreasing—or arguably stalling nearly completely, depending on how one chooses to interpret the low acceptance of network copylefts.
This talk will survey the many factors that drive adoption, with particular focus on learning from the very different adoption curves of GPL v2 and Affero GPL v3. While some factors are obvious and reasonably well-understood (particularly the shift towards SaaS economics) many other nuanced factors play in as well, including ‘killer apps’, the legal industry’s understanding of licenses, and the engagement of license authors.
Luis Villa
Luis lead the drafting of Mozilla Public License 2.0, and has participated in the drafting of many other copyleft licenses, including multiple Creative Commons versions and the ODbL. He's currently General Counsel and co-founder of Tidelift.
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