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

[zooko]

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