Hacker News Reader

Not sure that "copyleft" is confusing or falling into disuse, I hear people talking about it without confusion pretty often. First time I've heard "reciprocal licensing".

I think "copyleft" is ubiquitous within the tech crowd but the first time I heard the term I was confused. Might be worth asking a few people you know in the real world who are not tech people to see if they knew what either means.

The only people who know the term "copyleft" are already familiar with GNU, the FSF, and the free software movement. That is a tiny pool.

“Reciprocal licensing” is not precise. I think ShareAlike is more descriptive (and consistent with CC licenses).

ShareAlike is also effective.

What we know for sure is that Copyleft is never going to work.

Never heard "ShareAlike" either, and it sounds like a proprietary file sharing feature for phones or something. I just say open source and everyone has always known what I meant.

It's a term from the Creative Commons family of licenses.

Does @ on HN actually work though? I didn't think that was a thing here.

No.