[copyleft-next] in defense of the TGPPL idea

Mike Linksvayer ml at gondwanaland.com
Thu Aug 9 17:29:50 UTC 2012


On Tue, Jul 24, 2012 at 11:07 AM, Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn <zooko at zooko.com> wrote:
> One particular detail of my TGPPL that I value and that I'm not sure
> the TPL provides is that if you take advantage of the permission to
> keep a derived work temporarily proprietary, then this obligates you
> to offer the same permission to people who make worked derived from
> your derived work.
>
> Make sense? So when I publish source code under the TGPPL, I'm not
> offering people the option of making a derived work, keeping it
> proprietary for a limited time, and then releasing it under a strict
> copyleft which disallows others from making time-limited proprietary
> derived works of it. On the other hand, I *am* offering people the
> option of making a derived work, making it Free/Open immediately, and
> disallowing others from making a proprietary derived work from it,
> even for a limited time.
>
> The latter option is currently the case for Tahoe-LAFS and the other
> software that I release in this way because I offer the recipient the
> choice of GPL or TGPPL. So if you want to make a derived work of
> Tahoe-LAFS without allowing anyone "downstream" of you to make a
> proprietary derivation of your work, even for a limited time, then you
> can do so by releasing your derived work solely under GPL.
>
> I'm interested in developing a "TGPPLv2" which is expressed as an
> "Additional Permission" to GPL. That would have exactly the same
> consequences as the current TGPPLv1, sketched above, but it would
> probably be better in a lot of ways to have it expressed as an
> "Additional Permission" to GPLv3+.

Makes sense, but I admit that until I skimmed the OSI license-discuss
archives you pointed at a few days ago in
https://lists.fedorahosted.org/pipermail/copyleft-next/2012-August/000111.html
that I missed that you see as critical requiring passing along delayed
free release if one takes advantage of that permission, and that's
what makes forming as an additional permission difficult. I'm not sure
all discussants on license-discuss fully got that either.

It probably will not surprise you that I'm skeptical of the value of
this twist, especially as you aren't even using it. But maybe you
would be if also offering under GPL wasn't required for
GPL-compatibility and/or OSI-certified-OSD-compliant licensing?

Anyway, contrary to some people on license-discuss who seemed to think
forming as an additional permission is impossible, because requirement
to pass along delayed free release permission is an added burden, it
seems to me it is merely difficult. I don't see how conditioning an
additional permission imposes a burden; it merely reduces the scope of
the additional permission, just as public license conditions scope
their permissions.

I hope you and Bradley or whoever does this. Most of my criticism of
TGPPL conceptually is that I don't think it'll make much of a
difference and a description of why I guess no such thing has taken
hold. Incompatibility is what I think tips TGPPLv1 into the negative.
I could well be wrong about the concept being valuable, so I look
forward to it being available via a GPL-compatible mechanism.

(If instead or similarly developed as a copyleft-next additional
permission, I wonder if it'd also have to address the proprietary
relicensing permissive pill.)

Coincidentally, someone just today proposed (as a thought, not an
implementation for approval) a "Delayed GPL" on license-discuss:
http://projects.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss/2012-August/000536.html


> Mike posted some criticism of the very idea of TGPPL which I'd like to
> (briefly‽) address.
>
> Mike wrote:
>
>> It may be possible to demonstrate theoretically that an in-between tweak is necessarily superior to both, but not with any precision, and I'm dubious even of this.
>
> I agree that reliable evidence about this is difficult to come by.
> Nonetheless, I believe I should act based on my current understanding
> rather than hesitate while looking for better data.
>
> I personally have pretty high confidence that copyright maximalism,
> including "Limited Time →  ∞", will yield a worse social outcome than
> some alternatives. More controversially in some circles (presumably
> including this one), but less controversially among mainstream
> economists, I have pretty high confidence that pure copyleft, in which
> "Limited Time = 0", will yield a worse social outcome than some
> alternatives.

I don't think copyright duration is really relevant (maybe it would be
if it included mandatory registration with source escrow, and release
upon expiration, but even then the present value would be close to
nil). Instead, something like "time till forced source revelation".

> My reason for believing that latter assertion is that I think the
> production and usage of Free/Open software on earth has grown only
> modestly over the last couple of decades, while production and usage
> of all software has exploded immeasurably. Software has changed
> everything for billions of humans, it appears likely to do so even
> more rapidly in the coming decades, and Free/Open software is less and
> less important to that. Free/Open software is a tiny and rapidly
> shrinking sliver of all software, as measured by human values -- how
> much time people spend with it, how much of their money, their
> memories, their rights and freedoms they entrust to it, etc.
>
> A typical situation is that the lower-layer and more commoditized
> parts of the software stack are more likely to be Free/Open, e.g.
> operating systems and web browsers, and the higher-layer and newer
> parts are more likely to be proprietary and to otherwise deny freedom
> to their users, e.g. Facebook and more or less the entirety of the
> Web. It is those newer and higher-layer services that are most
> valuable to users and most dangerous to their freedoms. For the vast
> majority users it would make little difference to them if you switched
> their Windows for Linux or their MSIE for Firefox, but it would be
> unthinkable for them to leave Facebook, or migrate off of Oracle, or
> stop subscribing to the software vendors and web sites that they rely
> on, etc.
>
> So, I personally believe Free/Open software is a social good that is
> massively, drastically under-produced, just as simple economic theory
> would predict. I think -- or rather I hope -- that a better social
> outcome is possible somewhere in the middle, between the two extremes
> of 0 and ∞. TGPPL is my stab at it. We can't do much worse than we are
> already doing. ☹
>
> I recognize that this may be surprising or unpleasant to this
> audience. I mean no offense. You are the big fish in a pond. I'm
> asserting that beyond this pond, the world of bigger ponds is growing
> at an incredible rate. I very much value and respect your
> contributions, including those of Red Hat, which can be measured in
> real money.

We could be doing far worse, but I agree we could be doing much, much
better, and the situation is dire.

No public license innovation is going to make the big difference needed.

Mike


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