[License-discuss] Open Source Eventually License Development

[fred trotter]

Hi,
       I am sending this to both FSF and OSI people. Please tolerate
my use of the various terms interchangeably, I know the various rules
but I am talking to two different communities, if at all possible
please permit me to skip the "I don't like your choice of terms"
lecture.

       I have just returned from OSCON, where I gave an Ignite talk on
Open Source Eventually, which is yet-another-fine time ransom license
that converts to FLOSS. While there I had several meetings with Monty
Widenius about his Business Source concept. He and I have tentatively
agreed to merge our efforts. I was also advised by Simon Phipps and
Deborah Bryant to investigate the history of the concept here on the
mailing list, which I have done. I have seen the history with
GhostScript, the thread on delay-able open source licenses from Qian
Hong and the recent and original discussions about TGGPL from zooko.
With that historical context in mind, let me outline my aim.

First, no ransom license of any type should ever be OSI approved as an
Open Source license or be FSF approved as a Free Software License.
Ransom licenses are proprietary until they are Open Source or
Free/Libre. I am not going to ask you to compromise the core values of
our community by putting lipstick on a pig.

Second, despite this, both OSI and FSF should consider having a
position, either formally or informally on these licenses. We need to
standardize on one specific license text that is "known good" for this
type of business approach to avoid license proliferation. Real world
FOSS users would be better served by having a standard license, than
having lots of slight variations because:

* All of the promotors of this concept are writing different licenses,
so we are again facing a license proliferation problem.
* Poorly written or understood versions of this license could "taint"
the release of subsequently released FLOSS software.
* Automated license compliance systems will have a difficult time
evaluating licenses that always have different data (dates) embedded
in the license text.
* Companies using the delayed method should have the option to choose
from the menu of OSI/FSF/CC licenses as the "target" licenses
* The license should support different "proprietary intents", such as
Monty's aim to favor small business with costless versions, or zooko's
idea of creating a "proprietary community". No version of these
proprietary intents should be able to mar the conversion of the
license to a FOSS license at the specified conversion date.
* Users should be able to trust that they have the right to perform
the conversion to FOSS themselves and should not be in a position to
pay for software with the mere promise of a subsequent and separate
release.
* Companies who are using this method should have a limit to the
maximum time they can delay a release, because 20 years would be just
as bad as a software patent.
* The licensing methods should be compatible with automated compliance software.
* The licensing methods should be compatible with current file
conventions "README, LICENSE, COPYRIGHT etc etc"
* The license should work for hardware, bioware and "other" things,
not just software.
* end users should be mostly protected from any obvious misuse of the license

With that in mind, I would like to propose the following process to
develop this idea further.

First, I would like for the OSI and FSF people on this list to
consider some kind of new status for a license, like "OSI tolerated"
or "OSI Not Open Source But It Doesn't Suck" , or "Not Free Software
but tolerated for this purpose" or something like. Some way to clearly
mark this as "the standard way of time delaying a FOSS release" but
not actually "OSI/FSF Approved".

Second I would like for interested parties to join me developing the
license on GitHub.
https://github.com/ftrotter/OSE

At this stage, I am accepting issue creation and will be using that to
remove obvious bugs from the text. If a git pull feels comfortable to
you, that works too. I will of course require copyright assignment for
text modifications.
Once the basic license no longer sucks I will setup a co-ment instance
for public comment.
Finally I might be able to get NOD (my employer) to actually pay for a
legal review once everything is done.

We will be releasing data sets under the resulting license as soon as
it is ready.

Remember, I am not specifically advocating for the "Time Ransom
License" approach. I remain somewhat uncomfortable with the approach.
However, I am somewhat more uncomfortable not being able to make a
living making Libre Software. There are enough people doing this that
unless we sort something formal out, an FLOSS project is going to be
put in a situation where it relied on copyrights to revert to Open
Source or Free/Libre Software Licenses and that either did not happen
or happened in an unreliable manner. If you are uncomfortable with
this business model, then it is even more important that you
participate with specific criticism. Some issues will be endemic to
approach, but many issues might be avoided with careful crafting of
the language. If we are careful we will get something that an Open
Source or Free Software community can rely on.

Feel free to submit an issue on github, but if you prefer to submit
your issues with a "reply all" I will convert them to github issues
and address them in the license (or acknowledge that I will be unable
to address them)
Please do take a second actually read the license and its README.md
file on github, I have spent some time actually thinking the various
issues through and I need comment on what is actually missing from our
actual license, and not a merely a theoretical discussion as such.

IANAL and as per normal if someone else can point me to a project with
similar scope and aims I will be happy to withdraw my project (I am
sure Monty would do the same, assuming his aims were met)...

Thanks,
-FT


--
Fred Trotter
Blog: http://radar.oreilly.com/fredt
Twitter: https://twitter.com/fredtrotter