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

[Chris Zumbrunn]

On Feb 19, 2009, at 15:45 , Michael Tiemann wrote:

> Um, what does this mean to you: "The Transitive Grace Period Public  
> Licence
> has requirements similar to the GPL except that it allows you to  
> wait for up
> to twelve months after you redistribute a derived work before  
> releasing the
> source code of your derived work."?  To me it means that the release  
> of a
> derived work denies the open source property of that derived work  
> (and hence
> also to the community who contributed to that derived work) for a  
> period of
> time.

No, because for the first twelve month the license behaves like a  
permissive open source license. After that period it converts to a  
copyleft license. So, it isn't fair at all to say that the license  
isn't open source for the first twelve month. That's like claiming  
that the BSD isn't open source.

The license says:

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;

Note that it *doesn't* say that You can distribute copies under the  
TGPPL and then release the source 12 months later, which probably is  
what you were thinking.

> I think we all agree that when Apple distributes a derived work of  
> the BSD
> code (OSX) with no promise at all of ever releasing the source code  
> to their
> derived work (OSX), that it's not open source, even if they do  
> contribute
> substantial changes back to the BSD community.  And that is as it  
> should
> be.

What is not open source? The BSD code that they derived there work of  
is open source, which is the correct comparison here.

> Creating an arbitrary period of limbo, be it 12 seconds or 12 months  
> or
> 12 years, is a bridge too far.

Yes, I hate it when that happens (somebody promising to release  
something under an open source license sometime in the future).

What I'm wondering about is, under *which* license or choice of  
licenses somebody could distribute their derived works during that 12  
months period, since it clearly isn't the TGPPL.

Chris