[License-discuss] Query on "delayed open source" licensing

[Roland Turner]

(replying on list as this seems in scope for license-discuss, although 
it clearly wouldn't be for license-review)

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.

Two examples stand out for me:

  * 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.
  * 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+.
      o 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.

- Roland


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On 26/10/23 09:43, Seth David Schoen wrote:
> 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
>
> https://code.librehq.com/ots/dosp-research/-/blob/main/notes.md
>
> and you can contribute any additional pointers by e-mail at
> <dosp-research at opensource.org>.  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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