[lug] Re: [BLUG-ANNOUNCE] BLUG Meeting Announcement 2009-04-09

[zooko]

> Anyone have any particular things you want to hear Jason talk about  
> in the area of open source law?

I want his opinion about my open source licence, the Transitive Grace  
Period Public Licence.

My idea is this:

If I give you code under the BSD licence, you may make a derived work  
and redistribute it under proprietary restrictions indefinitely.  For  
example, Apple was able to use some source code from FreeBSD and  
NetBSD to write Mac OS X, without any obligation to open source Mac  
OS X.

If I give you code under the GPL licence, you may make a derived work  
and redistribute it under proprietary restrictions for no time at all.

My idea is that there might be some value for "How long can you have  
special proprietary rights to your derived work" which is less than  
infinity and greater than zero and which might provide greater social  
benefits than either zero or infinity.  In the TGPPL, that number is  
12 months.  If you take the source code of my Tahoe project [1] under  
the terms of the TGPPL, and you make a derivative of Tahoe and  
provide it to your customers, then you are required to open-source  
your derivative under the terms of the TGPPL no more than 12 months  
after you started serving customers with it.

Here is a nice PDF slideshow written by my friend Ping Yee which  
shows the idea graphically:

http://zooko.com/tgppl.pdf

(Also attached to this message.)

This licence has been heatedly discussed on the Open Source  
Initiative's license-review mailing list, but so far to no  
conclusion.  Here are some pointers into that thread:

http://www.crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?17:msn:497:hnghfggnikagbelnanba
http://www.crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?17:mss: 
475:200812:ofpndmgcgmbhbmimpkpe
http://www.crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?17:mss: 
633:200902:ohmlmjhfgcomafnjaghe
http://www.crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?17:mss: 
493:200901:ofpndmgcgmbhbmimpkpe

Regards,

Zooko

P.S. Oh yes, the text of the licence: http://zooko.com/tgppl.html

[1] http://allmydata.org

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