[License-discuss] Idea for time-dependent license, need comments

[zooko]

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