Temporary Propietary License

Mike Linksvayer ml at gondwanaland.com
Sun Jul 22 20:19:14 UTC 2012


On Thu, Jul 19, 2012 at 5:59 PM, Richard Fontana
<fontana at sharpeleven.org> wrote:
> On 07/19/2012 12:07 AM, Ted Ts'o wrote:
>> I'm curious what people think of this idea; is it workable?  Are there
>> some fundamental flaws with this approach?
>
> It seems very similar in concept to a later license written by Zooko
> Wilcox-O'Hearn called the Transitive Grace Period Public License (a slight
> modification of Larry Rosen's OSL to add a 12-month grace period) and used
> (with GPL) as part of the dual license of Tahoe-LAFS.
> https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/browser/docs/about.rst#license
> I wonder if he was influenced by your paper.

TGPPL was my first thought upon seeing TPL, which I hadn't before. But
I see Ted noticed TGPPL http://tytso.livejournal.com/63142.html ... I
suspect zooko would've mentioned TPL somewhere had he known, but I'll
ask him on identi.ca.

I appreciate the last slide of https://tahoe-lafs.org/~zooko/tgppl.pdf
because I think everyone ought at least attempt to provide a welfare
analysis of things they advocate. But some things that point to that
stylized graph being exaggerated, too precise, or wrong:

* Temporal flexibilities and inflexibilities that make copyleft and
permissive licensing less differentiated than pictured, eg adapting
vendor can delay source distribution and get away with it, without any
special permission to do so; effectively restrict source distribution
via customer contracts; distribution channel can demand source/free
license immediately; SaaS.

* The welfare effects of copyleft and permissive licensing are a
matter of intuition, conjecture, and expression of tribal affiliation;
basically, they're unknown (but please refer me to anything that might
enlighten me). 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.

* If a T[GPP]L like mechanism were widely used, it might increase
confusion, lawyers fees, maintenance of proprietary forks, effort
spent merging stale forks, general practice of proprietary licensing
and delayed free release (both arguably on decline as of now). Yes
last especially possible with permissive licensing or
vendor-controlled copyleft, but as with vendor-controlled copyleft, a
mechanism intended to promote general welfare could give business
warped ideas. Also, the mechanism validates the incentive narrative of
copyright, which I think is largely an idealized and harmful myth. :-)

* The nearest practice I know of was Aladdin's, and they stopped a
long time ago (of course not exactly the same, as they didn't pass on
permission to delay via a public license). It isn't that hard to make
up a mechanism if there's a business reason to. AFAIK nobody has
bothered to do so other than zooko, and AFAIK nobody has bothered to
actually use the TGPPL's permissions (I could easily be wrong, but
certainly not many).

I realize some of the above might be FUD-ish. Not calling any of above
fatal flaws and I'm happy to be wrong. What works or sort of works
would be released under copyleft-next+tp-supp if this existed and was
widely accepted as reasonable, that aren't being released now?

Mike


More information about the copyleft-next mailing list