For Approval: Transitive Grace Period Public Licence, v1.0

[zooko]

Dear license-review at opensource.org:

Please approve the Transitive Grace Period Public Licence, v1.0, as  
compliant with the Open Source Definition.

Rationale for a new licence:

If Alice gives Bob a work under a permissive licence such as a BSD- 
style licence, then Bob may create a proprietary derived work and to  
make his derived work available to others without revealing the  
source code to them.  One could say that the "grace period" during  
which he is allowed to distribute proprietary derived works and  
before he is compelled to open source his derived work is endless.   
If Alice gives Bob a work under a transitive licence such as the GPL  
or the OSL, and Bob makes a derived work available to others, then he  
is obligated to share the source code of his derived work with others  
immediately.  One could say that the "grace period" offered to him is  
zero minutes.

I hypothesize that some duration of grace period more than zero and  
less than infinity might yield greater social good.  By being less  
than infinite (in fact, 12 months), it compels the producers of  
derived works to share their source code.  By being greater than  
zero, it facilitates the use of the capitalist feedback loop, in  
which part of the value that the work produces for others is directed  
to making more resources available for producing more of such work.   
Hopefully the combination of these two properties will yield greater  
aggregate social good than either property would alone.

Please see Ping Yee's eloquent summary, which expresses the rationale  
in a few sentences and pictures:

https://zooko.com/tgppl.pdf


Compare and contrast with the most similar OSI-approved licence:

The Transitive Grace Period Public Licence, v1.0, is almost identical  
to the Open Source License, v3.0, except for the following change  
(ignoring naming and meta-licensing changes):

Tue Nov  6 21:36:49 MST 2007  zooko at zooko.com
   * add grace period
diff -rN -u old-tggpl/tggpl.txt new-tggpl/tggpl.txt
--- old-tggpl/tggpl.txt 2008-12-14 19:51:13.000000000 -0700
+++ new-tggpl/tggpl.txt 2008-12-14 19:51:13.000000000 -0700
@@ -11,7 +11,7 @@

           2. to translate, adapt, alter, transform, modify, or  
arrange the Original Work, thereby creating derivative works  
("Derivative Works") based upon the Original Work;

-         3. to distribute or communicate copies of the Original Work  
and Derivative Works to the public, with the proviso that copies of  
Original Work or Derivative Works that You distribute or communicate  
shall be licensed under this Transitive Grace Period Public Licence;
+         3. to distribute or communicate copies of the Original Work  
and Derivative Works to the public, with the proviso that copies of  
Original Work or Derivative Works that You distribute or communicate  
shall be licensed under this Transitive Grace Period Public Licence  
no later than 12 months after You distributed or communicated said  
copies;

           4. to perform the Original Work publicly; and


Provide results of any legal analysis available:

I asked a friend who is a lawyer (and a long-time hacker and open  
source proponent) what he thought and he thought it was a good idea.


Recommend which licence proliferation category is appropriate:

Other/Miscellaneous licenses

(I hope that someday it will be popular and widely used and with  
strong communities.)


Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,

Zooko O'Whielacronx
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