Re: [License-discuss] Idea for time-dependent license, need comments
On Jul 20, 2013, at 12:49 PM, John Cowan wrote: Mike Milinkovich scripsit: So you are asserting that by getting a single patch accepted into the Linux kernel that I can, under US copyright law, re-license the entire work? As long as I share any proceeds equally with all other copyright holders of course. In principle. However, a judge might well decide that that was not enough to make you a joint author. Judges aren't computers. To clarify, a joint owner could authorize use of the work under a license that is different from the original license, but that doesn't effect a change of the license altogether. The original license, from the other joint author(s), remains, so what you really would have is a dual-licensed work - admittedly still suboptimal, but the joint author couldn't remove the open source license altogether. And John points out in principle a patch could create a joint work, but I expect it would take a much more substantial contribution than that. I don't think someone can realistically come along and hijack a project by submitting a few minor changes. Pam Pamela S. Chestek, Esq. Chestek Legal PO Box 2492 Raleigh, NC 27602 919-800-8033 pam...@chesteklegal.com www.chesteklegal.com___ 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
Pamela Chestek wrote: To clarify, a joint owner could authorize use of the work under a license that is different from the original license, but that doesn't effect a change of the license altogether. The original license, from the other joint author(s), remains, so what you really would have is a dual-licensed work - admittedly still suboptimal, but the joint author couldn't remove the open source license altogether. And John points out in principle a patch could create a joint work, but I expect it would take a much more substantial contribution than that. I don't think someone can realistically come along and hijack a project by submitting a few minor changes. Pam is right. Although, as a practical matter for commercial companies, this can become a nightmare scenario. For example, in the patent context, if there are multiple inventors then each of them can frustrate the attempts of the other inventors to commercialize the patent by offering the patent at a lower price. Why would someone license intellectual property if he believes he can get it for less while the joint inventors argue amongst themselves. :-) Whether or not this scenario is good for FOSS or for commercial sponsors of FOSS is, I presume, fact specific. But from my perspective, a joint creation scenario is very risky without a written contract to refer to. /Larry From: Chestek Pamela [mailto:pam...@chesteklegal.com] Sent: Saturday, July 20, 2013 12:28 PM To: license-discuss@opensource.org Subject: Re: [License-discuss] Idea for time-dependent license, need comments On Jul 20, 2013, at 12:49 PM, John Cowan wrote: Mike Milinkovich scripsit: So you are asserting that by getting a single patch accepted into the Linux kernel that I can, under US copyright law, re-license the entire work? As long as I share any proceeds equally with all other copyright holders of course. In principle. However, a judge might well decide that that was not enough to make you a joint author. Judges aren't computers. To clarify, a joint owner could authorize use of the work under a license that is different from the original license, but that doesn't effect a change of the license altogether. The original license, from the other joint author(s), remains, so what you really would have is a dual-licensed work - admittedly still suboptimal, but the joint author couldn't remove the open source license altogether. And John points out in principle a patch could create a joint work, but I expect it would take a much more substantial contribution than that. I don't think someone can realistically come along and hijack a project by submitting a few minor changes. Pam Pamela S. Chestek, Esq. Chestek Legal PO Box 2492 Raleigh, NC 27602 919-800-8033 pam...@chesteklegal.com www.chesteklegal.com ___ 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 02:50:58PM -0500, Karl Fogel wrote: Hi, Zooko! Hello Karl! Thanks for the thoughtful comments. If you have a pointer, that'd be great. I don't see it on the list of approved licenses. I'll dig some up. Added to my todo list. 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. Right. What I said above is not quite true. 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. So, this is a really good question, and I think the practical answer to it is very different depending on whether you got a copy of the source code at the beginning, during the temporarily-proprietary period, or not. If you as a user need to get source code from me in order to exercise your Free and Open rights, after the grace period has expired, then it would be an interesting question if you could compel me to divulge it. But on the other hand, if you already have the source code, and in order to exercise your rights, you need only to do so, secure in the knowledge that I'm not going to successfully sue you for having done so, then this seems quite practical to me. What do you think? 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. Hm, if I understand correctly this is also potentially a problem for the situation that you don't yet have a copy of the source, but not really a problem for the case that you do. By the way, I just posted a lengthy explanation to the tahoe-dev mailing list, because some people were asking about some source code which is temporarily proprietary to my company: https://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2013-July/008610.html In this case, we've elected to publish the source code now, even though we're not granting Free and Open rights to it yet. The TGPPL doesn't require us to share the source code during the temporarily-proprietary period. Perhaps some descendent of it should. 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
John Cowan wrote: Well, if you were a judge, how would you rule if Alice had supplied a non-de-minimis patch to Bob's program and Bob had accepted it and republished the work with it? Looks like a contract to me, admittedly a parol one (but plenty of jointly authored books seem to have no more than that), and Alice at least obviously intended her work to merge with Bob's, as her work is incapable of standing alone. If Bob's intent was different, what could it have been? Whe! I get to be a judge for a change! If I had such power, I would rule that Alice had licensed her work to Bob and that her work remains under her license. Based upon a review of her license and her actions, I would rule that Bob had authority to include it in his program under his collective or derivative work license. That analysis, as John notes, is based mostly on contract law, in which the intent of the parties certainly plays a major role. But let's look to the written contracts first. Everyone should honor both the Alice and Bob licenses. Quite frankly, I no longer care whether the works are de minimis or are capable of standing on their own. Under FOSS rules, software can stand or sit based on its own virtues regardless of the original programmer's intentions for it -- as long as his or her license is honored. An example that comes to mind is the book _Intelligent Life in the Universe_, by I.S. Shklovskii and Carl Sagan. Great book, by the way. Very influential in its time. It led to many more books on that topic even though it bore a copyright notice and wasn't free. Nowadays, of course, we read about such things for free on the Internet. /Larry -Original Message- From: John Cowan [mailto:co...@mercury.ccil.org] Sent: Saturday, July 20, 2013 2:00 PM To: lro...@rosenlaw.com; license-discuss@opensource.org Subject: Re: [License-discuss] Idea for time-dependent license, need comments Lawrence Rosen scripsit: It is a nice idea in principle, but it falls flat in practice. Courts usually require more than just a claim of joint authorship. They demand a contract, or at least some obvious manifestation of intent, to create a joint work. Lots of these court cases deal with rock bands that broke up. I bet those were about the rights to thorough-composed songs, however. The case of a jazz band and the rights to recordings of live performances might be a different story. I think it would be pretty hard to claim such a performance was not a joint work -- it practically tracks the definition word for word. I am aware of no FOSS project -- particularly any that uses a contributor agreement or membership agreement -- that would survive a court test for joint authorship. Well, if you were a judge, how would you rule if Alice had supplied a non-de-minimis patch to Bob's program and Bob had accepted it and republished the work with it? Looks like a contract to me, admittedly a parol one (but plenty of jointly authored books seem to have no more than that), and Alice at least obviously intended her work to merge with Bob's, as her work is incapable of standing alone. If Bob's intent was different, what could it have been? An example that comes to mind is the book _Intelligent Life in the Universe_, by I.S. Shklovskii and Carl Sagan. The first author wrote the book in Russian, and someone translated it into English, presumably as a work for hire. Then the second author heavily annotated the translation, adding sections, paragraphs, sentences, and even individual words interleaved with it. He put an inverted delta sign at the beginning of each such insertion and a delta sign at the end, showing the exact boundaries of his contributions. The result went back to the first author, who then annotated the result again with new text between delta and inverted delta, and so on until the authors were mutually satisfied, always keeping the boundaries clear. Now suppose that there had been no written contract between the authors. Would this prima facie have been a joint work, or a collective one? The original work stood alone; Sagan's first-order contributions did not, nor did any of the following contributions in later rounds. The intention was evidently to create a single new work. The authors never quarrelled, fortunately, so nobody ever had to decide. -- Using RELAX NG compact syntax toJohn Cowan co...@ccil.org develop schemas is one of the simplehttp://www.ccil.org/~cowan pleasures in life --Jeni Tennison co...@ccil.org ___ 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 2013-07-19, at 11:31 PM, John Cowan co...@mercury.ccil.org wrote: 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. Well, I think that many would argue that such a work is a collective, rather than a joint work. In fact, it seems to me that most of the large collaborative communities are running under that assumption. ___ 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
Mike Milinkovich scripsit: Well, I think that many would argue that such a work is a collective, rather than a joint work. In fact, it seems to me that most of the large collaborative communities are running under that assumption. A collective work is defined as a work, such as a periodical issue, anthology, or encyclopedia, in which a number of contributions, constituting separate and independent works in themselves, are assembled into a collective whole. Now maybe you could claim that an individual file constitutes a separate and independent work. But a patch? I doubt it. -- John Cowanhttp://ccil.org/~cowan co...@ccil.org Lope de Vega: It wonders me I can speak at all. Some caitiff rogue did rudely yerk me on the knob, wherefrom my wits yet wander. An Englishman: Ay, belike a filchman to the nab'll leave you crank for a spell. --Harry Turtledove, Ruled Britannia ___ 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
Well, I think that many would argue that such a work is a collective, rather than a joint work. In fact, it seems to me that most of the large collaborative communities are running under that assumption. A collective work is defined as a work, such as a periodical issue, anthology, or encyclopedia, in which a number of contributions, constituting separate and independent works in themselves, are assembled into a collective whole. Now maybe you could claim that an individual file constitutes a separate and independent work. But a patch? I doubt it. So you are asserting that by getting a single patch accepted into the Linux kernel that I can, under US copyright law, re-license the entire work? As long as I share any proceeds equally with all other copyright holders of course. ___ 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
Mike Milinkovich scripsit: So you are asserting that by getting a single patch accepted into the Linux kernel that I can, under US copyright law, re-license the entire work? As long as I share any proceeds equally with all other copyright holders of course. In principle. However, a judge might well decide that that was not enough to make you a joint author. Judges aren't computers. -- Well, I'm back. --SamJohn Cowan co...@ccil.org ___ 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
Re: Joint and collective works This comparison between collective and joint works has frequently been the topic of conversation at OSI. I remember, for example, some of us arguing that the Linux license could be changed from GPLv2 to GPLv3 by any of its joint authors, and that IETF standards could be licensed as joint works so that any of its authors could create derivative industry standards. It is a nice idea in principle, but it falls flat in practice. Courts usually require more than just a claim of joint authorship. They demand a contract, or at least some obvious manifestation of intent, to create a joint work. Lots of these court cases deal with rock bands that broke up. :-) I am aware of no FOSS project -- particularly any that uses a contributor agreement or membership agreement -- that would survive a court test for joint authorship. On the other hand, what the world is left with is a collection of collective works, stuck like a pincushion with tiny open source licenses on each component. Anyone who wants a copy of the pincushion gets every individual pin that's attached to it. A joint work concept might be better for FOSS if it could be implemented by joint, contractual agreement. But it isn't. /Larry Lawrence Rosen Rosenlaw Einschlag, a technology law firm (www.rosenlaw.com) 3001 King Ranch Rd., Ukiah, CA 95482 Office: 707-485-1242 Linkedin profile: http://linkd.in/XXpHyu -Original Message- From: Mike Milinkovich [mailto:mike.milinkov...@eclipse.org] Sent: Saturday, July 20, 2013 9:27 AM To: license-discuss@opensource.org Subject: Re: [License-discuss] Idea for time-dependent license, need comments Well, I think that many would argue that such a work is a collective, rather than a joint work. In fact, it seems to me that most of the large collaborative communities are running under that assumption. A collective work is defined as a work, such as a periodical issue, anthology, or encyclopedia, in which a number of contributions, constituting separate and independent works in themselves, are assembled into a collective whole. Now maybe you could claim that an individual file constitutes a separate and independent work. But a patch? I doubt it. So you are asserting that by getting a single patch accepted into the Linux kernel that I can, under US copyright law, re-license the entire work? As long as I share any proceeds equally with all other copyright holders of course. ___ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@opensource.org http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss ___ 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
Lawrence Rosen scripsit: It is a nice idea in principle, but it falls flat in practice. Courts usually require more than just a claim of joint authorship. They demand a contract, or at least some obvious manifestation of intent, to create a joint work. Lots of these court cases deal with rock bands that broke up. I bet those were about the rights to thorough-composed songs, however. The case of a jazz band and the rights to recordings of live performances might be a different story. I think it would be pretty hard to claim such a performance was not a joint work -- it practically tracks the definition word for word. I am aware of no FOSS project -- particularly any that uses a contributor agreement or membership agreement -- that would survive a court test for joint authorship. Well, if you were a judge, how would you rule if Alice had supplied a non-de-minimis patch to Bob's program and Bob had accepted it and republished the work with it? Looks like a contract to me, admittedly a parol one (but plenty of jointly authored books seem to have no more than that), and Alice at least obviously intended her work to merge with Bob's, as her work is incapable of standing alone. If Bob's intent was different, what could it have been? An example that comes to mind is the book _Intelligent Life in the Universe_, by I.S. Shklovskii and Carl Sagan. The first author wrote the book in Russian, and someone translated it into English, presumably as a work for hire. Then the second author heavily annotated the translation, adding sections, paragraphs, sentences, and even individual words interleaved with it. He put an inverted delta sign at the beginning of each such insertion and a delta sign at the end, showing the exact boundaries of his contributions. The result went back to the first author, who then annotated the result again with new text between delta and inverted delta, and so on until the authors were mutually satisfied, always keeping the boundaries clear. Now suppose that there had been no written contract between the authors. Would this prima facie have been a joint work, or a collective one? The original work stood alone; Sagan's first-order contributions did not, nor did any of the following contributions in later rounds. The intention was evidently to create a single new work. The authors never quarrelled, fortunately, so nobody ever had to decide. -- Using RELAX NG compact syntax toJohn Cowan co...@ccil.org develop schemas is one of the simplehttp://www.ccil.org/~cowan pleasures in life --Jeni Tennison co...@ccil.org ___ 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
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
Re: [License-discuss] Idea for time-dependent license, need comments
Hello, Just want to share a link of 'business source license', it sounds closed to my original though about 'delay-able open source license', but it is known not OSD-compliant. http://developers.slashdot.org/story/13/06/26/1552215/monty-suggests-a-business-friendly-license-that-trends-open Hopefully you would like it :) Cheers. ___ 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
Quoting Qian Hong (fract...@gmail.com): Just want to share a link of 'business source license', it sounds closed to my original though about 'delay-able open source license', but it is known not OSD-compliant. http://developers.slashdot.org/story/13/06/26/1552215/monty-suggests-a-business-friendly-license-that-trends-open Hopefully you would like it :) Thanks, Qian. I've only just skim-read Monty Widenius and Linus Nyman's two pieces[1] on the subject, so: There's actually a long history of this, and I'd say it's already at least a familiar if not well-accepted general concept, i.e., Aladdin Ghostscript was produced under just such a licensing regime for many, many years[2], and resulted in release of improvements to GNU Ghostscript that might never otherwise have occurred. (Peter Deutsch's Aladdin Software used for that purpose what he called the Aladdin Free Public License, which, it should be pointed out, was _not_ a free-software licence, explicitly denying conveying of a licence for commercial use. Deutsch maintaining that proprietary branch from around 1990 to 2006.) Like Deutsch's naming scheme, there is some whiff of propaganda about Monty's, i.e., the assumption that business implies proprietary, but, hey, that's Monty for you. [1] http://monty-says.blogspot.fi/2013/06/business-source-software-license-with.html http://timreview.ca/article/691 [2] http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Printing-HOWTO/ghostscript.html -- Cheers,Being die-hard loyal to a company is like being in an intimate rela- Rick Moen tionship with a brick. The brick cares nothing for you. The brick rick@linux will only cause you pain when it forgets about you. The brick serves mafia.com only its interests, and nothing else is of consequence. --Mackieman ___ 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
Rick Moen scripsit: Like Deutsch's naming scheme, there is some whiff of propaganda about Monty's, i.e., the assumption that business implies proprietary, but, hey, that's Monty for you. He makes a point of saying that he doesn't like the name much. He probably wouldn't like Soak-The-Rich Source very much either, but it sure is descriptive. You could be more polite and economist-y and say Price-Discrimination Source or Capture-The-Consumer-Surplus Source. Or whatever. -- And through this revolting graveyard of the universe the muffled, maddening beating of drums, and thin, monotonous whine of blasphemous flutes from inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond Time; the detestable pounding and piping whereunto dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic tenebrous ultimate gods --the blind, voiceless, mindless gargoyles whose soul is Nyarlathotep. (Lovecraft) John Cowan co...@ccil.org ___ 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
Hello, Marc Thanks for your reply! Sorry for so long delay, my mail filter unexpected archived this thread, my bad. On Fri, Aug 10, 2012 at 12:19 AM, Marc Whipple mwhip...@itsgames.com wrote: Without getting too far into your actual term suggestions, you seem to be trying to control who can benefit from your license based on who they are (nimble startup versus evil monopoly) not on what they do with the licensed material. You're trying to get at it in a putatively user-neutral way, but you come right out front and say you're trying to control market outcomes with it. Without speaking for anybody but myself, I tried to get a you can do X but not Y for Z time period with the licensed material if you meet the other requirements and it got shot down. It got shot down with the nicest rejection notice I've ever gotten, but the message was clear. I don't see this general line of attack working: to the extent it will fit into the open source guidelines, it will not do what you want, and to the extent it does what you want, it will not fit into the open source guidelines. While I am a lawyer, this is not legal advice, and I do not speak for or represent any other member of the open source community. It's entirely possible I'm wrong, and if so, I look forward to having my error pointed out to me. As a programmer without strong law background knowledge, it is difficult for me to push my idea further at this time, but I am still looking forward if there is somebody (either myself or others) will discuss it further someday. I believe I'll come back someday ;-) Anyway, thank you very much, hopefully next time I'll be more serious to push this idea. -- Regards, Qian Hong - Sent from Ubuntu http://www.ubuntu.com/ ___ 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
Without getting too far into your actual term suggestions, you seem to be trying to control who can benefit from your license based on who they are (nimble startup versus evil monopoly) not on what they do with the licensed material. You're trying to get at it in a putatively user-neutral way, but you come right out front and say you're trying to control market outcomes with it. Without speaking for anybody but myself, I tried to get a you can do X but not Y for Z time period with the licensed material if you meet the other requirements and it got shot down. It got shot down with the nicest rejection notice I've ever gotten, but the message was clear. I don't see this general line of attack working: to the extent it will fit into the open source guidelines, it will not do what you want, and to the extent it does what you want, it will not fit into the open source guidelines. While I am a lawyer, this is not legal advice, and I do not speak for or represent any other member of the open source community. It's entirely possible I'm wrong, and if so, I look forward to having my error pointed out to me. MW -Original Message- From: license-discuss-boun...@opensource.org [mailto:license-discuss-boun...@opensource.org] On Behalf Of Qian Hong Sent: Sunday, August 05, 2012 12:00 PM To: license-discuss@opensource.org Subject: [License-discuss] Idea for time-dependent license, need comments Hi folks, I'm considering to create a new open source license which is so called time-dependent license. I've thinking about it for more about one year, however, due to lack of law knowledge I'm not able to submit a formal request of review right now. I would like to post my idea here and listen to suggestions, any comments are great appreciated! The time-dependent license is something like below: Assume we have a license named time-dependent GPL, or Delay-able GPL, or simply DGPL, which allow others: 1. Free redistribution source code and binary of the DGPL software 2. Create derived work from the DGPL software 3. Author of the derived work does not have to release the source code as soon as the binary is released, however, she/he has to release the source code after a define time, which is define in the license of the original work, for example, 4 years. 4. The derived work author can always release new version of their production with binary only at first, however, for each version she/he has released, finally she/he has to released the source code of that version. For example, binary v1.0 is released in 2012, binary v1.2 is released in 2013, so source code of v1.0 has to be released in 2016, and source code of v1.2 has to be released in 2017. My goal is to create a license which could encourage commercial using of open source code but prevent monopoly. Let's imagine the below scene: A. - Some guys created an open source software called Open Ware which is released under MIT. - A young company called New Soft built a commercial software called Great Ware base on Open Ware. For commercial purpose they decided to close source Great Ware. - Luckily several years later New Soft became a large company with great income, unfortunately, the company did not benefit the Open Ware community too much. What's worse, New Soft might become monopoly one day. B. - Some guys created Open Ware, which is released under DGPL - A young company called New Soft considered to build a commercial software base on Open Ware, at first they even didn't know how long their company will live, so they didn't mind too much about whether they have to release the source code in the future. DGPL was acceptable at that time, so they decided to use it. - Luckily again, several years later, New Soft became a successful company. However, New Soft had fewer chance to become monopoly, since it had to release the source code of their old production, so either the open source community or some random competitor could follow up with New Soft based on the old production from New Soft. On the other hand, New Soft still has the chance to keep up their market share if they work hard enough to continue improving their production, since they didn't need to release the latest source code at once. Fair enough, isn't it? So the idea is to use some delay-able license when you are creating open source project which allow commercial use while you wouldn't like anyone to become monopoly. My question is, in theory is it possible to create such licenses which satisfy The Open Source Definition from opensource.org and usable under some law system such as the U.S. law? If possible, how about other variants, for example: A delay-able license, which is MIT-like at first, LGPL-like later, and GPL-like in the end; A delay-able license, which is MIT-like at first, and GPL-commercial-dual-license-like in the end - at first anyone can freely (as beer) create derived work without releasing source code, however, some years later (
