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

[Michael Tiemann]

On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 1:01 PM, Chris Zumbrunn <chris at zumbrunn.com> wrote:

>
> 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.


I think that my subsequent response where I discuss the fictitious
"Arbitrary and Capricious Licnese" explains the very real problem with
trying to stretch the OSI-approved umbrella to cover mechanisms that select
between various open source licenses under the control of some privileged
entity.

To say nothing of the confusion that seems to persist about whether initial
state of TGPPL-licensed software.

M