[copyleft-next] transitive grace period

Zooko Wilcox-OHearn zooko at leastauthority.com
Wed Feb 20 20:04:58 UTC 2013


Folks:

I'm interested in the possibility of using (a future version of)
copyleft-next for Tahoe-LAFS ¹. One possible way to do that would be
to define "version 2 of the Transitive Grace Period Public Licence" to
be some future version of copyleft-next, or a derivative of
copyleft-next. Since Tahoe-LAFS is licensed ³ under "Transitive Grace
Period Public Licence, version 1 or, at your option, any later
version", then I think this would allow everyone to start using
Tahoe-LAFS under the terms of copyleft-next. Another possibility could
be that the rights-holders (the Tahoe-LAFS Software Foundation) could
re-license it under copyleft-next.

My main motivation for considering copyleft-next is that I value
concision, simplicity, and readability-to-the-layman. So the pitch for
copyleft-next as published in LWN ⁴ appeals to me.

There are other things that appeal to me about it, such as the patent
lawsuit termination clause.

Now, I'm writing to ask: what would it take for me to offer a
*transitive* grace period for proprietary derived works? If I
understand correctly, §2 prevents a copyright holder from granting
only copyleft (not permissive) rights to some people under
copyleft-next while granting time-unlimited permissive works to other
people.

However, consider this scenario, which is actually real life and not
hypothetical:

1. Copyright to the Tahoe-LAFS source code is held by The Tahoe-LAFS
Software Foundation.

2. LeastAuthority.com (that's my company) has written extensions to
Tahoe-LAFS, which constitute a derived work of Tahoe-LAFS source code.
LeastAuthority.com has no special permissions to use the Tahoe-LAFS
source code other than the publicly available open source licensing
cited above.

3. LeastAuthority.com would like to keep our derived work proprietary
for a limited time — 12 months from when we start redistributing or
hosting it.

4. LeastAuthority.com would like to *not have the option* of changing
our minds and keeping the derived work proprietary for longer than
that. This may be surprising to you, but it is a form of safety for
our customers. We're hoping to get more customers because they know
that we *don't have that option*, even if we were to get bought out by
a larger company with very different plans than ours.

5. LeastAuthority.com would like, at that future time when we grant
open source rights to use our derived work, if other people are able
to make derived works of our derived work, and if they are able to
keep their derived work proprietary for a limited time, but it is
important to us that they are *not* able to keep their derived work
proprietary for longer than that.

All of the above is actually true, except of course that the parts
about what we desire and intend may change with the weather.

Now if I understand correctly, if the Tahoe-LAFS Software Foundation
were to license the Tahoe-LAFS source code under copyleft-next v0.2,
then the Tahoe-LAFS Software Foundation would be able to make
proprietary derived works, or to license others to do so, in a
time-limited way, but LeastAuthority.com would not. Is that correct?
Do you see why that doesn't satisfy our (current) desires?

¹ https://tahoe-lafs.org
² https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/browser/COPYING.TGPPL.rst
³ https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/browser/docs/about.rsthttp://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/537559/d26523c309dc9933/

Regards,

Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn

Founder, CEO, and Customer Support Rep

https://LeastAuthority.com


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