I like BSD licenses. MPL 2.0 in principle is good, because it has the right balance between viral licenses and permissive licenses.
What I was thinking of, was a new license, where it's like MPL 2.0, except it applies to the entire directory, instead of per file, and that it be simpler. I like the patent clauses in many of these licenses, however, they become incompatible with viral licenses such as a few of GPL's. Either the license wouldn't have a patent clause, or it would have only the opt in exception only for the patent clause to allow exceptions to GPL's part of the patent clause. Of course, GPL and this license wouldn't combine code within the same directory, but they would be used together this way. Simply, by not having a patent exception, can make it exclude GPL code. This kind of license would make it so that, when a project's original owners stop making updates, the code can't be forced into a viral license, where the original less restrictively licensed part is hard to find or lost. This would also be a more reasonable replacement for LGPL. LGPL has more restrictions than it's stated purpose. The directory license (without a patent clause or an exception for patent clauses) would make a lot more sense for hardware drivers and compilers than any other license, especially than GPL and even LGPL licenses.
I was wondering what was wrong with the GPL, and it's that the license terms extend beyond its directory, and dictate other contributions outside of the authors' contributions. My understanding of how it works out in principle is that, a lot within GPL is dual licensed, but when it contains the GPL code, that's a snapshot of that total piece. As soon as BSD code is removed or separated from that GPL piece, it functions as BSD-like or its original permissive licensed code again.
MPL 2.0, for comparison, makes it so, code adjustments to an MPL licensed file has to be contributed back. Outside of that file, they can do what they want with it, permitted MPL is allowed by that other code, for example that their patent licenses are compatible. MPL has the right balance, and it can be used side by side with Apache code. Their only problem is the difficulty that their use must have wide degrees of separation from GPL code, because of patent clause conflicts, unless there's linking exceptions made in a complex way or dual licensing.
In one argument, all licenses, including BSD have patent protections, even if not stated, because the copyright becomes the basis, which someone else can't make a patent off of it or something like that. There were two phrases, one was, that something obvious can't be patented, so the copyright may make something obvious, another was a phrase that has been mentioned here. Preexisting work of art? Apache's and MPL's licenses seem safer for protection from patent trolling. GPL seems like another end of the spectrum from patent trolling, it's more like viral absorption with a bit more freedom.
Edit: I'll propose a Nonviral Directory License, which I've described the idea of it above. LGPL, CDL and MPL are weak copyleft licenses. So that would be weak copyleft too.
Weak copyleft licenses that are nonviral are the best ones. The only problem with them is compatibility with viral licenses. They make it so, improvements to that code must be given back, however, code outside of its scope which can be used with the licensed code doesn't have to be given back. GPL tries to dictate what's outside of its directory.
