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

[Ben Reser]

On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 12:50 PM, Karl Fogel <kfogel at red-bean.com> wrote:
> zooko <zooko at 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.