[License-discuss] Draft for discussion: Project Tick General Public License v2.0 (only)

[Bruce Perens]

On Thu, Jan 22, 2026 at 6:08 AM M.samet Duman <dumanmehmetsamet at icloud.com>
wrote:

> 1. Explicit opt-in for network-based source obligations
> 2. Network operation triggers source availability only, not full conveyance
>

So, this is now three licenses, depending upon what you opt in. This is a
similar issue to my criticism of Creative Commons licenses. If you say you
have a Creative Commons license, nobody has any idea what rights they have
other than the right to read the material. You have also left a big door
for argument about the inclusion and the clarity of the statement enabling
the license feature. The more argument, the more expensive and uncertain
any enforcement of the license.


> > Such operation may be treated as conveyance solely for the purpose
> > of triggering the source availability obligations expressly set forth
> > in this License, where an Explicit Network Use Notice applies.
>

May means "you can, but you don't have to. There should be a single and
definite action that activates the terms or not. And "treated as
conveyance" is a rather oblique way to say "activates these terms", and can
be subject to yet more argument.

You have also left lots of room for argument about what is general
infrastructure, unrelated, independent, proprietary, tightly-coupled,
service glue, deployment-specific code. For example, is all of the Debian
distribution general infrastructure, every one of 70K packages?

>
> > Technical mechanisms … are permitted provided that such mechanisms
> > do not prevent recipients from accessing, modifying, or conveying
> > the Corresponding Resource of the covered Work under the terms of
> > this License.
>

The anti-tivoi-ization provisions in GPL etc. generally have the effect of
making it possible for the platform upon which the software was conveyed to
have modified software installed and continue to perform all of its
functions. You didn't state enough to make that effective in the language I
see.

Before you actually submitted this as a license, you would have to deal
with the GPL copying, and make use of an attorney for the license language.
Failure to make use of an attorney is in general a harmful action to
developer who use the license, since it would be prone to fail in
unanticipated ways, making them incapable of enforcing their copyrights,
and subject to various sorts of liability. Making the language suitable for
acceptance is probably a year's work, with some expense, don't take it
lightly.

    Thanks

    Bruce
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