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

[lrosen at rosenlaw.com]

[Disclaimer: the statements below reflect the best of our recollection, but
we can't guarantee that our memory of events that are in some cases 30 or
more years in the past are accurate. It is only because of Bradley Kuhn's
judgmental and misleading posting that we want to respond.]  

 

On 10/27/23 13:06, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote:

> FWIW, I can confirm Larry Rosen's suggestion that indeed L. Peter 

> Deutsch and Aladdin Ghostscript likely invented the manipulative 

> marketing approach of pre-announcing that proprietary software might 

> someday be FOSS and/or making semi-binding public statements or 

> licensing terms that backup that marketing approach.

 

We believe that Eric Allman (sendmail) invented dual-track releasing for
sendmail simultaneous with, or slightly before, Deutsch's dual-track release
of Ghostscript.  We may be wrong that it was Allman, but we do remember
hearing that someone else was doing this around the same time that we recall
hearing buzz about Ghostscript and AFPL.

 

Deutsch's expressed preference for the AFPL over the GPL arose from what he
saw as a serious "free rider" issue for commercial distribution, initially
motivated by fax software vendors distributing Ghostscript executables with
their products and invoking them as black boxes through the equivalent of
'exec', which the GPL allows without bringing the entire product under the
GPL.  His views differed from FSF's, and he was aware that FSF didn't
approve of them, but neither the initial use of the AFPL alone, nor
dual-track release with delayed GPL, is "manipulative".

 

"Might someday" also mischaracterizes Deutsch's statements.  Once Deutsch
started releasing Ghostscript with both the AFPL and the GPL (which was not
how he started out -- he added deferred GPL release later because of his
desire to support the FOSS community as well as possible subject to his view
of the free rider issue), he stated clearly and without qualification that
AFPL releases of Ghostscript would be released with GPL after a one-year
delay.

 

In our opinion, the AFPL was a well-intentioned but ultimately unsuccessful
attempt to address the free rider issue while maintaining the benefits of
the GPL for the FOSS ecosystem.  It was eventually abandoned for Ghostscript
in favor of straight dual-track (GPL + commercial) licensing.  As far as we
know, the GPL'ed and commercial versions were identical, aside from
specialized device drivers and CPU-specific performance enhancements
(created by Artifex Software's engineers, not by Deutsch) that were only
offered with the commercial licenses, and were released simultaneously.

 

> Wikipedia[citation needed] says ghostscript first shipped in 1988. 

> This ten year old version of wikipedia's page on "source code escrow":

 

Deutsch first offered a paid service of copying Ghostscript onto diskettes
and mailing them in 1987: among other things, this commercial activity
(fully compatible with the GPL) allowed him to register the (source code)
copyright.  We don't know what license he used, but we believe it was the
AFPL.

 

BCC: 

 

Lawrence Rosen

707-478-8932

3001 King Ranch Rd., Ukiah, CA 95482

lrosen at rosenlaw.com <mailto:lrosen at rosenlaw.com> 

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