Re: [License-discuss] Idea for time-dependent license, need comments
I suspect the Business Source Licence is inspired by my Transitive Grace Period Public Licence: https://tahoe-lafs.org/~zooko/tgppl.pdf https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/browser/trunk/COPYING.TGPPL.rst But, the Transitive Grace Period Public Licence is an Open Source licence. There's a subtle difference between the Transitive Grace Period Public Licence and predecessors such as the Aladdin/Ghostscript thing. I've been having trouble explaining the difference to people. Maybe that's because it isn't important! But it seems important to me. The difference is that with the Transitive Grace Period Public Licence, there is no distinguished entity who has special privileges compared to the public. My company, https://LeastAuthority.com, writes software which is a derived work of TGPPL-ed software. There are two ways that this is totally different from the Aladdin-style licensing, and both of them have to do with LeastAuthority.com being bound to the same terms as anyone else. 1. LeastAuthority.com doesn't have the option of changing our minds and *not* releasing our software under open source terms after the grace period expires. Because we're don't have a right to make a proprietary derived work of the upstream work (Tahoe-LAFS) *other* than under the Transitive Grace Period Public Licence, and that licence allows us to make a proprietary derived work *only* if it is a temporarily (12-month) proprietary derived work. This matters to you as a user, because you don't depend on us taking any action, and you don't depend on us keeping our original plan instead of changing our minds. You can be assured that you have full Free and Open rights to our derived work 12 months after we distributed or hosted it, simply because we don't have the option to deny that to you. 2. Any member of the public has the same right to make temporarily-proprietary derived works of *our* works, just as we had the right to make our derived work of the upstream work temporarily-proprietary. This opens up the possibility of an ecology of competing commercial improvements which can be kept proprietary, but only for up to 12 months each. To me, these are significant differences. To almost anyone else that I've ever talked to, they don't see the difference between TGPPL, Aladdin's practices, and this new Business Source Licence. Oh well. :-) By the way, I submitted this licence to license-review several years ago, so you can find discussion of it in those archives. Regards, Zooko ___ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@opensource.org http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss
Re: [License-discuss] Idea for time-dependent license, need comments
zooko zo...@zooko.com writes: I suspect the Business Source Licence is inspired by my Transitive Grace Period Public Licence: https://tahoe-lafs.org/~zooko/tgppl.pdf https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/browser/trunk/COPYING.TGPPL.rst But, the Transitive Grace Period Public Licence is an Open Source licence. Hi, Zooko! I was going to say that TGPPL had not been submitted to the OSI for evaluation as an open source license (nor, as far as I'm aware, has the FSF evaluated it either)... but then I saw your point at the end that it *has* been submitted before, though you don't say the outcome. I don't have the archive link handy, and unfortuntely they're a bit hard to search for. If you have a pointer, that'd be great. I don't see it on the list of approved licenses. There's a subtle difference between the Transitive Grace Period Public Licence and predecessors such as the Aladdin/Ghostscript thing. I've been having trouble explaining the difference to people. Maybe that's because it isn't important! But it seems important to me. The difference is that with the Transitive Grace Period Public Licence, there is no distinguished entity who has special privileges compared to the public. Note lThe copyright owner is still special, as always. My company, https://LeastAuthority.com, writes software which is a derived work of TGPPL-ed software. There are two ways that this is totally different from the Aladdin-style licensing, and both of them have to do with LeastAuthority.com being bound to the same terms as anyone else. 1. LeastAuthority.com doesn't have the option of changing our minds and *not* releasing our software under open source terms after the grace period expires. Because we're don't have a right to make a proprietary derived work of the upstream work (Tahoe-LAFS) *other* than under the Transitive Grace Period Public Licence, and that licence allows us to make a proprietary derived work *only* if it is a temporarily (12-month) proprietary derived work. Right. (If LeastAuthority were the copyright owner, though, then you would have that option.) This matters to you as a user, because you don't depend on us taking any action, and you don't depend on us keeping our original plan instead of changing our minds. You can be assured that you have full Free and Open rights to our derived work 12 months after we distributed or hosted it, simply because we don't have the option to deny that to you. As a matter of law, I don't know if any member of the public could enforce that license, or if it would have to be the copyright owner (of Tahoe-LAFS) who enforces it. But whatever the answer is for the GPL, it's probably the same for TGPPL. 2. Any member of the public has the same right to make temporarily-proprietary derived works of *our* works, just as we had the right to make our derived work of the upstream work temporarily-proprietary. This opens up the possibility of an ecology of competing commercial improvements which can be kept proprietary, but only for up to 12 months each. It also opens up a method of gaming the system, whereby every twelve months someone creates a shell company, which then makes a new derivative, while the old company goes out of business, so there's never any party that exists long enough for anyone else to enforce the expiration of the grace period. Just saying :-). To me, these are significant differences. To almost anyone else that I've ever talked to, they don't see the difference between TGPPL, Aladdin's practices, and this new Business Source Licence. Oh well. :-) License comprehensibility turns out to be an important survival criterion in open source, yeah... By the way, I submitted this licence to license-review several years ago, so you can find discussion of it in those archives. (mentioned above) Best, -Karl ___ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@opensource.org http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss
Re: [License-discuss] Idea for time-dependent license, need comments
On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 12:50 PM, Karl Fogel kfo...@red-bean.com wrote: zooko zo...@zooko.com writes: The difference is that with the Transitive Grace Period Public Licence, there is no distinguished entity who has special privileges compared to the public. Note lThe copyright owner is still special, as always. This is an important point. The only way the copyright owner isn't special for an *overall* *work* (emphasis is important) is if there are so many copyright holders that it becomes impossible to get them all to agree to change the license (e.g. Linux Kernel). Especially, when the work is so intertwined the individual contributions are not particular worthwhile independently (the copyright owner is obviously always special for the work they did themselves). In a case like that everyone really is on a level playing field because nobody owns the copyright to enough of the software to simply take their ball and go home. As far as I can tell you can't artificially create this situation with a license and I think it is similar to the public domain problem (i.e. there's no clear way to give up those rights). If the copyright holder never accepts outside contribution or requires copyright assignments or a license agreement that allows them to relicense the work then it is practically impossible for such a situation to be created. I'd argue that it's actually pretty difficult for most open source software to reach the mass of contributors to make this situation come up. It can be helped by disappearing contributors (death, pseudonym and no longer responds) etc.. But in general unless a piece of software has a mass appeal and is really popular you're always going to have no more than a handful of contributors. For the projects that do reach that level of mass contribution there is a great appeal to prevent this situation. For one thing you are essentially never able to adjust your license and you may find it difficult to enforce the license, if you can enforce your license your remedies may be limited since you will find registering your copyright difficult. In fact some large open source organizations actively work to prevent their code falling into this situation. E.G. the FSF and ASF: http://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/Copyright-Papers.html http://www.apache.org/licenses/ (see the Contributor LIcense Agreements section) The FSF page goes into some of the reasons I mentioned above in far more detail for avoiding this. So I have real reservations that the TGPPL will actually work the way Zooko intends. It might if applied to a popular enough code base and no effort was made to subvert the distribution of the copyright ownership. Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, this isn't legal advice and anyone trying to decide on a license should consult an attorney. ___ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@opensource.org http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss
Re: [License-discuss] Idea for time-dependent license, need comments
Ben Reser scripsit: This is an important point. The only way the copyright owner isn't special for an *overall* *work* (emphasis is important) is if there are so many copyright holders that it becomes impossible to get them all to agree to change the license (e.g. Linux Kernel). Especially, when the work is so intertwined the individual contributions are not particular worthwhile independently (the copyright owner is obviously always special for the work they did themselves). In that case, the work is probably a joint work, defined by the U.S. copyright act as a work prepared by two or more authors with the intention that their contributions be merged into inseparable or interdependent parts of a unitary whole. In a joint work, *any* author can change the license under which the work may be exploited, contrary to the folk theory that says *all* authors must agree. However, the proceeds, if any, must be divided equally among all the authors. In this case, of course, there are no proceeds. -- Where the wombat has walked,John Cowan co...@ccil.org it will inevitably walk again. http://www.ccil.org/~cowan (even through brick walls!) ___ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@opensource.org http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss
