Every copyleft license gets at least a double-question-mark. I don't know for certain why he did that, of course, but experience has taught me that copyleft licenses are inherently more confusing than permissive ones.
Copyleft licensing is permissive licensing with additional conditions. Larry Rosen made this point with his Academic Free License and Open Software License. They're the same form, with just one difference, in 1(c). That difference turns the AFL, a permissive license, into the OSL, a copyleft license.
Copyleft license conditions beg interpretive questions about what actions trigger copyleft requirements and what actions satisfy those requirements. Common copyleft licenses differ in their triggers and requirements, as well as how they express them in the legal text.
No, they are not confusing. Nothing is confusing about copyleft, especially to a lawyer. I mentioned offhand the concept of copyleft to my completely non-technical lawyer mother, who hasn't looked at copyright law since she was at university in the 1970s and she immediately understood the concept. It's a very obvious concept.
They're not liked by companies that want to be able to take everything for themselves and never give back. This article is just typical anti-copyleft FUD.
I'm a committer to a major piece of open-source software, and author of many more pieces of open-source software. I think it's pretty difficult to call me someone who wants "to be able to take everything...and never give back".
And I've talked to lawyers! And I still stay far away from the popular copyleft licenses. There's far too much gray area in what constitutes a derivative work and what obligations I might unwittingly take on even when well-advised.
Well it's good that I never said you were then. Maybe actually read and understand my comment before responding to it next time.
I said that they aren't liked by companies that want to be able to take everything and never give back. I never said that they were ONLY liked by those companies, and I can't believe you're both capable of writing software and not capable of understanding that distinction, which leads me to believe that you must be either lying (about writing software) or trolling.
You can stay away from whatever licences you like. Their interpretation is very clear and well-known. If you think that something might be 'borderline' then don't do it. Even if it's technically fine it's almost certainly going against the intent of the licence, which is morally wrong.
The only obligation you could possibly take on is the conditional obligation that if you convey a derived work then you must make the source code available. That's not a difficult obligation, because you are already distributing the source code, because you aren't a fucking terrible human being (right?).
What you did was try to break out a cheap rhetorical trick to try to paint anyone who expresses a concern about copyleft, knowing you could always back out with "well, I never said that..."
And of course in your most recent comment you did it once again, sneaking in a back-door assumption that people who would have a problem with copyleft are "fucking terrible human beings".
You should stop doing that. Because you aren't "a fucking terrible human being", right?
Meanwhile, I'm pretty sure I've had this exact debate on HN before, but:
We went any number of rounds of this with Django a while back, precisely because there's such a large gray area. I still don't honestly know whether someone could claim we've accidentally triggered the GPL by providing a database backend module in Django that can talk to GPL'd MySQL drivers. We've just navigated as carefully as we can, there.
And no, it is not some sort of simple, settled, well-understood thing, so maybe you could stop presenting it as if it is? That'd be great.
