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

[Lawrence Rosen]

>     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;
> 
> So, this depends on whether the license is applied but is in abeyance
> during the 12 months, or whether this is a /contract/ and the creator of
> a derivative work is agreeing to apply the license after the 12 months.

I don't understand what difference that would make for the OSD, although I
agree that the legal analysis during litigation and damages may be different
under different legal theories. So what?

There was a reference much earlier in this thread to the Aladdin Public
License, which the Transitive Grace Period Public License somewhat
resembles. The Aladdin license was an old non-open source license, used for
Ghostscript and some other wonderful software [1], that applied for a year
and then was re-released under the GPL. I wrote about it briefly in my book
as an alternative to open source and referred to it as "eventual source", a
term that never caught on. 

A few years later I learned from the president of Artifex Software, the
company that distributes Ghostscript [http://artifex.com/] that they no
longer use that business model. Perhaps transitive grace periods don't work
in practice?

/Larry

[1] Peter Deutsch, the author of those programs and of the Aladdin Public
License, was a founding board member of OSI. Again, everyone knew that the
Aladdin license was *not* open source.



Lawrence Rosen
Rosenlaw & Einschlag, a technology law firm (www.rosenlaw.com)
3001 King Ranch Road, Ukiah, CA 95482
707-485-1242 * cell: 707-478-8932 * fax: 707-485-1243
Skype: LawrenceRosen
Author of "Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and 
                Intellectual Property Law" (Prentice Hall 2004)



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bruce Perens [mailto:bruce at perens.com]
> Sent: Thursday, February 19, 2009 10:34 AM
> To: Michael Tiemann
> Cc: Chris Zumbrunn; license-review at opensource.org
> Subject: Re: For Approval: Transitive Grace Period Public Licence, v1.0
> 
> Michael Tiemann wrote:
> > If Bruce's logic is correct, the TGPPL creates a trojan horse
> > situation where the license would (if the OSI were to grant such
> > approval) claim open source over top of code that did not, in fact,
> > carry the open source property.  That would be Bad.
> The lanuguage in the license is:
> 
>     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;
> 
> So, this depends on whether the license is applied but is in abeyance
> during the 12 months, or whether this is a /contract/ and the creator of
> a derivative work is agreeing to apply the license after the 12 months.
> 
>     Thanks
> 
>     Bruce