work.md

# 2023-11-07:

* (James+Karl) High-level organizing and writing in the report.

* (Seth) Did rate of outside contribution change after BUSL
  relicensing of Terraform, and maybe same for some other project that
  either didn't have a fork or that had a not-conspicuously-successful
  fork.  Not sure which project that latter would be, but it would be
  great if we could identify one for comparison, since the Terraform
  fork has so conspicuously successful so far.

* (Seth) Similar investigation using bug tracker data instead of
  commits.

* (Seth) Figure out what other DOSP licenses there are:

  See "Licenses indexed there that I'm not familiar with and that we
  should double-check for possible DOSP-nature" in notes.md.

* (Seth) Remaining todo items from 2023-11-03 entry below.

* (James+Karl, for now at least) We should raise (but not try to
  answer) the question of why some BUSL-relicensed projects stimulate
  flourishing FOSS forks while others do not.  Even within Hashicorp's
  projects there are pretty dramatic contrasts.

# 2023-11-03: 

* Mark items in notes.md so we know what remains to be investigated in there.

  Also, organize the items (either rearranging in groups or via
  tagging) to make clear which ones are the kind of DOSP we're
  interested in,

* High level organization of report.

    - Start w/ Early History as top-level section: Aladdin
      Ghostscript, & why they went to straight-up proprietary
      relicensing.

      Point out how Ghostscript was not a database nor a web dev
      library -- it wasn't the sort of thing that would raise the more
      modern worry of "Hey, my competitors will use my thing for free
      *to compete with me*."

      Seth notes that while we do see Company Q expressing displeasure
      at competitors picking up Q's stuff and just using it to
      directly compete with Q, and we see Q switching to a DOSP
      license therefore, it often seems that AGPL was not seriously
      considered.  Understanding why would be really useful.

    - Then Motivations: today, why are people doing it?

    - What is their business model?

    - What sector are they in?

* Document similarity between Android ecosystem and video game developer

* Document that Trolltech agreed to a DOSP fallback for QT contractually

  ...and say we don't know if they actually ever did DOSP.

* BUSL

  - Has any project ever come out of the gate de novo as BUSL?
    Or is it always relicensing an existing open source project?

    QUESTION / THOUGHT: It *might* the pattern for BSL and things like
    it is that a project's owners relicense to those only after their
    product gets traction under a truly OSS license first -- i.e., use
    OSS dynamics to gain attention, usage, and investment/loyalty, and
    then use BUSL to centralizedly capture more of the value from that
    loyalty than would have been possible if the project had remained
    under a from-the-start OSS license.

  - QUESTION: Why did the BUSL'ing of Terraform catch so much more
    blowback than other things that Hashicorp BUSL'd?

  - QUESTION: If we wanted to dive deeply on this one, we might want
    to get stats on how many contributors jumped ship to the recent
    OSS fork of Terraform vs how many stayed (and how many decided to
    straddle both projects).

  - OBSERVATION: Hashicorp has a CLA-checker bot that makes sure all
    the authors of a PR have signed the CLA (the CLA that presumably
    allowed them to relicense contributor's changes).

* Explain distinction between BUSL and (upcoming) FSL

  FSL is basically a temporary non-compete -- that's its only
  proprietary term, and it's an innovation relative to licenses that
  have that as a permanent proprietary term.

# 2023-10-30: Seth/Karl meet and discuss next steps

* For each project mentioned in notes.md, make sure that we have the
  date (or rough time period) and a basic idea of what happened with
  that project.

* For any license that looks open source to us but is not
  OSI-approved, find out if it was submitted to license-review@ and/or
  to license-discuss@, and what the result was.  These may be long
  threads; we will need to summarize.

  Examples of these might include: 

    - "Bootstrap Open Source License" (BOSL).  *NOTE*: this is NOT
      RELATED to the Bootstrap open source project at
      getbootstrap.com!  Instead, see

      https://electriccoin.co/blog/introducing-tgppl-a-radically-new-type-of-open-source-license/

      https://notes.andymatuschak.org/zVYtYLQkMVEV4zR9SF8i25k

    - "Transitive Grace Period Public License" (TGPPL): This is really
      the same as the BOSL above -- BOSL is just a rename of TGPPL.
      (And Ted T'so proposed "TPL" before this.)

* Decide if we're using an "eras" approach, and, if we are, decide
  what the eras are.