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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">(replying on list as this seems in
scope for license-discuss, although it clearly wouldn't be for
license-review)</div>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix"><br>
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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">This is in an interesting question and
one that I've been thinking about lately (in particular as a
potential talk for FOSSASIA 2024) because of the recent rush of
half-baked "open-source companies" going through the transition to
reality.</div>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix"><br>
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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">Two examples stand out for me:</div>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">
<ul>
<li>The informal agreement between RMS and the author of
Ghostscript to always make a copyleft version available, and
the latter's decision to keep the promise by making his
commercial releases available under a copyleft license 12
months later. This is a non-enforceable promise to RMS rather
than to licensees, but the outcome is similar. I don't know
the current status of this practice.</li>
<li>The MariaDB Business Source License, which includes an
additional "Change License" grant in the original license;
this latter grant comes into effect automatically for each
release on its fourth anniversary, and includes at licensee's
option at least Gnu GPLv2+.</li>
<ul>
<li>This came to my attention as a result of HashiCorp's
recent adoption of it for most of their code. It appears at
first glance that their BSL is not identical to MariaDB's,
but the intention appears to be the same.</li>
</ul>
</ul>
<p>- Roland</p>
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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 26/10/23 09:43, Seth David Schoen
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite" cite="mid:ZTnEL2Io6SvdoILj@demorgan">
<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">Hi license-discuss members,
I'm working on a research project with Open Tech Strategies and the Open
Source Initiative, on the topic of delayed open source licensing.
This refers to licensing models where a project is initially published
under non-open-source terms, but with a promise that the code will be
relicensed as open source, with some delay or under some conditions, in
the future. In some cases this may be a recurring practice where
updated versions are continually relicensed on a specific schedule over
time.
Of course, license instruments that implement this strategy are not
themselves open source licenses. But we thought it was likely that
subscribers of this list would be familiar with examples of this
practice and might be able to suggest some that we haven't identified
yet. As Karl Fogel writes,
> We’d like to gather as many examples as we can, both historical and
> modern, for a whitepaper that will examine the effects of DOSP on open
> source projects and on open source as a whole. The paper will take no
> position in the paper on the desirability of DOSP; its purpose is to
> provide accurate historical description and objective analysis.
You can see examples that we already know about at
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://code.librehq.com/ots/dosp-research/-/blob/main/notes.md">https://code.librehq.com/ots/dosp-research/-/blob/main/notes.md</a>
and you can contribute any additional pointers by e-mail at
<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:dosp-research@opensource.org"><dosp-research@opensource.org></a>. Most replies should probably not
be sent on-list to license-discuss, as we are not intending to suggest
that these are examples of open-source licenses.
(In my interpretation, one-off relicensing of formerly proprietary
software under an open source license, that was not planned in advance,
isn't the phenomenon that we're looking at. So, famous cases like
Netscape Navigator, StarOffice, or Blender are probably not included
here -- they simply weren't working with an intended "delay".)
Thanks in advance for any suggestions!
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