I dislike copyleft, but once you decided to go for copyleft, I think a clause like this makes a lot of sense.
Copyleft licenses are inherently trying to coerce the world to be a certain way. A penalty clause like this is probably more effective at changing the world than the normal clauses.
Strong copyleft licenses like that don't get a lot of love these days. GPL has something similar.
One problem is that to enforce these kinds of clauses, the original rights holder needs to go around suing everyone as it's a contractual thing. It isn't a law.
You could always say no. In general, copyleft has always prioritized freedom for the users over freedom for the developers and clearly this new initiative is based on that same philosophy.
Personally I agree with copyleft licenses for as long as they are just restricting distribution as defined by copyright law. This because IMO there needs to be a clear, lawful boundary for what FOSS licenses can and cannot restrict.
True. However, I'm delineating here between the disapproval of the use of copyleft as a mechanism and your personal (and practical) preference to use something else that suits your needs better.
In essence, I think copyleft has its place and its existence is not in opposition with the notion that ideas cannot be owned, but I do see how it doesn't play out well for you practically.
From what I see, copyleft strictly allows for modification too, as long as the derived work also is licensed under the same terms. His clause prevents any modification.
No, the point of Copyleft is for you to not restrict the freedoms you got when you used the software when distributing it to others. You can use Copylefted software in any way to your heart's content in combination with whatever other software you want, you can just not distribute it using a more restrictive licence.
This is probably the most obvious example of why this would be much more radical of a change than some people would expect at face value. Copyleft literally can't exist without copyright. Corporate interests will restrict their code (and everyone else's) with NDAs instead, and they'll only distribute binaries like it's 1990 again, but worse.
I think opting out would be quite hard. Due to the nature of copyleft your code can end up in a lot of random projects (which are actually complying with the license) and those projects might not opt out.
Copyleft licenses are inherently trying to coerce the world to be a certain way. A penalty clause like this is probably more effective at changing the world than the normal clauses.
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