[copyleft-next] in defense of the TGPPL idea

Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn zooko at zooko.com
Tue Jul 24 18:07:47 UTC 2012


Folks:

Mike Linksvayer asked me if I was aware of Ted Ts'o's Temporary
Proprietary License. I was not consciously aware of it when I
developed the Transitive Grace Period Public Licence. I exchanged
email with Ted about it later.

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+.

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.

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.


> The nearest practice I know of was Aladdin's,

I don't think it is a valid comparison. Aladdin never offered to
anyone the option that they could make a proprietary derived work for
a limited time. So it provides no evidence on whether anyone would
have been interested in that option.

Now Tahoe-LAFS *has* offered people that option, and so far, to my
knowledge, nobody has taken us up on it. This probably just shows how
there is little commercial interest in Tahoe-LAFS, but it could also
be taken as evidence that the TGPPL is not itself a big draw for
investment.

By the way, commercial interest in Tahoe-LAFS is growing -- there are
now three companies offering commercial services based on it including
my own startup, and I'm aware of a few other expressions of commercial
interest.

Thank you for your attention. Please accept my bold, normative
statements in the spirit of constructive criticism that I intend.


Regards,

Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn

Founder, CEO, and Customer Support Rep -- Least Authority Enterprises

https://leastauthority.com


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