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

zooko zooko at zooko.com
Sat Dec 20 15:13:27 UTC 2008


Dear license-review:

Thank you, Bruce Perens, for your example of how a grace period  
clause could be written as an appendix to the OSLv3.  I like your  
idea of re-using licensing text by reference instead of by copy-and- 
modify.

However, as I currently understand it, the text you suggested would  
not have the same effect as the TGPPLv1 has.  Larry Rosen's post of  
December 14 indicates that an "added burden" would requires a new  
licence and not just a waiver appended to OSLv3.  This is consistent  
with what I've learned from Prof. Moglen as well as from my own  
analysis.  The requirement to transitively offer the grace period to  
users of your derived work is an added burden.

In any case, even if a licence with the same properties as the  
TGPPLv1 could be constructed as combination of an existing licence  
and added text, it would still need to have a separate name so that  
people could refer to it succinctly and unambiguously, and so that  
they could check whether bodies such as OSI have approved the  
resulting combined text as being open source or not.  For code that  
I've distributed and plan to distribute in the future, that name is  
"Transitive Grace Period Public Licence", although the version number  
could change, and I'm not opposed to future versions of TGPPL being  
constructed by reference instead of by copy-and-modify, if the result  
would have desirable properties.

Regards,

Zooko
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