Silly question: are usage restrictions covered by the OSD?

[Chris F Clark]

I have gotten a series of questions/replies similar to the following,
which I selected for no other reason than it was the most recent one
and it was addressed to the entire group.  (By the way, I do thank
those who have responded, many of the replies have had points that
were worthy of consideration.)

> So when someone's editing a file each time they write out the file
> they have to send the result to other people?

No, that's not the intent.  Such a requirement would be onerous and
pointless.  That is one of details, that is still being resolved, and
there are lots of little subtleties that need to be straightened out.

We don't want to require "every trivial" change to cause a requirement
for publishing.  In fact, we don't want to force preemptive publishing
at all, just a requirement that if a derivative version exists, that
other people who wish to have access to that version have a way of
getting the source code.  The idea we are trying to prevent is "secret
versions", versions where someone modifies the software in a
proprietary way and uses that software for "unfair" advantage.

The following example should be illustrative.  Cadence Design took a
copy of Emacs and modified it to have hooks into their propietary
design tool, Verilog-XL.  That is a derivative work of Emacs.
However, they chose not to distribute the modified verion to avoid
having to release "trade secrets".  Because some of the GPL
restictions apply only at the redistribution level, Cadence was able
to leverage Emacs into an internal tool that gave them a competitive
advantage.  The goal of the license I was proposing was to disallow
that as a vaild use of the copylefted sources. That is, once they
created such a derivative work, other users would have the right to it
also.  In particular, the folks at Synopsys, one of Cadence's
competitors, should have the right to view the modified source code in
case it helps them come up with a better version of their own tools.

In contrast, many users of emacs create a startup file that turns on
various modes, the intent of the license is not to require each of
them to put their version of emacs up on a publicly addressable web
page and post notice that such a version exists by taking out a full
page advertisement in the NY Times.  However, if you customize your
version of Emacs, and someone asks you, "How did you do that?", you,
as a derivative author, should be required to point them at a copy of
the code for your customization which they can learn from.

Hopefully, the above two examples also explain how we intend to
enforce this particular feature of the license--by competitor
pressure.  If one makes a derivative version of the software under the
license, and a competitor finds out, the competitor will have the
right to require that a copy of the software be made available to them
as open source (i.e. under the terms of the license), and if the
derivative author refuses, the derivative author will not have rights
to the derivative copy as they will be violating the terms of the
license which allowed them to make that derivative copy.

And here is one of the subtle points, perhaps we can only enforce
that restriction as an author.  That is to conform to the requirements
of copyright law, we might have to state that the author has the right
to request a copy of any derivative work be provided back under the
terms of the original license.  Then, if the competitor wanted to
enforce the clause, they would have to request the support of the
original author, and to have the author make the request to the
infringing derivative author.

However, since there is no such license submitted for approval that
attempts to implement such a restriction, if y'all want to ignore the
subtleties of how one might write such a license, that is fine by me.
I'm sure most of you have more important things to do.  Again, my
thanks for your time.

-Chris
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