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notes.md 9.25 KiB

This file contains free-form notes. Anyone working on this project, please feel free to reformat this (including to something other than Markdown) if you want.

Some additional license search methods

Databases licensed under BUSL:

https://dbdb.io/browse?license=business-source-license&q=

Elastic License v2 - has hosting noncompete clause but no conversion to FOSS

We can also do a search for particular SPDX values, like "BUSL" or "BUSL-1.1", in a SPDX line -- probably on GitHub!

Examples

Note that some of these examples are still just pointers that will need followup.

  • Stuff about TGGPL:

    The 2020 blog post Introducing BOSL, a radically new type of open-source license discusses BOSL license and gives some examples of its use.

    An earlier (2010) writeup about TGPPL from Ted T'so is The Transitive Grace Period Public Licence: good ideas come around….

    (See also https://github.com/zooko/tgppl -- note that Richard Fontana is in the commit history there.)

  • ONE-OFF Atom (text editor)

    (suggested by @Zaeraxa in reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37745772)

    Probably not DOSP: Apparently had no license at all prior to this.

  • NOT DOSP BerkeleyDB and Sleepycat?

    Probably not DOSP: simultaneous dual license.

  • FreeBSD netgraph

    Have not found any reference to licensing so far.

  • ONE-OFF Ghostty

    (suggested by @Zaeraxa in reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37745772)

    "A private project. I plan to open source it one day"

  • ONE-OFF Modular/Mojo (a highly-anticipated project from Chris Lattner (creator of LLVM, Swift, and XLA/TensorFlow).

    Possibly an example based on code quality and similar concerns, but no fixed schedule: https://docs.modular.com/mojo/faq.html#open-source

  • GitLab

    The situation with GitLab is interesting. They make some fairly specific public commitments that are somewhat DOSP-adjacent but are not themselves DOSP promises. They also say they default to moving features "down"ward, which in their nomenclature means toward the FOSS product; while that's not a binding commitment, they do seem in practice to be sticking to it.

    Overall, there does not appear to be an true DOSP activity here, but their way of operating probably warrants mention in the Appendix, as people interested in DOSP would also want to know about this.

  • UNCLEAR MkDocs

    I haven't found any delayed licensing information.

  • ONE-OFF Onivim 2 issue see also https://v2.onivim.io/early-access-portal and https://github.com/onivim/oni2/issues/3811#issuecomment-910306404 for additional history

    There was an early-access sponsorship system but there was never a public commitment to relicense the code under an open source license. The developer later stopped working on the project and then relicensed it as MIT in its entirety.

  • Android (Google's eventual publication of changes to AOSP)

    If Google has typically been pretty regular about releasing stuff to Android Open Source Project, even if they haven't formally committed to that regularity, then that would be a kind of de facto DOSP. (Question: do they preserve the commit metadata for commits originally made in the private repository, so that when those commits are published, the exact delay between the creation of the commit and its becoming public can be seen? Karl guesses that they do preserve all the metadata, but we should check.)

    Cf. the situation with video game development, as Seth noted.

  • OTRS (open source -> delayed -> proprietary), but one person said that the announced delayed open release never actually happened.

  • ONE-OFF Pixelfed "will be open sourced when we reach v1"

  • Qt (officially delayed releases in the past from Trolltech?)

  • UNCLEAR Zed

    (suggested by @Zaeraxa in reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37745772)

  • INAPPLICABLE Hudson->Jenkins

    Alex Scammon mentioned the Hudson->Jenkins transition to Karl. But on looking more closely into the history, it looks like this was not about licensing, but rather about community influence vs corporate (Oracle) influence on shared project decisions. (This article seems to give a good overview of what happened.)

An annoying nomenclature problem

Even though we seem to think that the Business Source License should be called BUSL, most of its end-users seem to refer to it as BSL! It may be awkward if we end up having a ton of citations where we say things like "the project FooWare announced it was using BUSL in 2022 (see 'Announcing FooCorp's Switch to BSL')".

Taxonomy

I (Seth) think there's a distinction to be made between these three cases:

  • "automatic": licenses that are not open source licenses but that state (in the license text somewhere) that they automatically convert / automatically permit use and redistribution subject to a specified open source license after a period of time

  • "manual": publicly announced practices of manually relicensing old codebase snapshots on a particular schedule, which depend on a person at the company explicitly making a delayed open source release

(In some sense, this is a potential distinction between a "delayed open source licensing business practice" and a "delayed open source license".)

  • "post-hoc" / "unscheduled": proprietary software that eventually was relicensed under an open source license, without a public statement of intent to do so at the time of its original publication, or without a published schedule for the conversion

I would include the former two in the scope of the report but not the latter one (except to explain how it's different). Some people have been suggesting some of these cases (which can be fairly famous, like Netscape Navigator!), but I think these should be thought of as more of a one-time "change" than a "delay".

See also Creative Commons Final Report: On the Viability and Development of Springing Licenses.

Lawrence Rosen's book Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law uses the term "eventual source".

And Kyle Mitchell just published (as we were in the middle of doing this research) the blog post A Short, Simple Template for Scheduled Relicensing, that should probably at least be referenced from our report.

Enforceability

The Creative Commons review seems to have been concerned that springing licenses can have enforceability problems. For their older Founders Copyright project, they actually used a copyright assignment to the Creative Commons nonprofit rather than (as they usually suggest for public licensing of creative works) a unilateral license document.

(Was that because of concerns that copyright can't necessarily be abandoned under U.S. law, or because of concerns that a licensor or the licensor's heirs could withdraw or revoke the license if it were given unilaterally with a delay?)

It might be helpful to understand how serious the enforceability concerns are, although it doesn't seem that they've ever been tested in court, so it may be hard to say anything definitive.

Threads where we have posted

Look in the follow-ups in these threads (and subthreads thereof) for more examples. Please add other threads here too.

Resources to check

More people to contact as we're gathering examples

If your name should be on the list below but isn't, please let us know!

  • Deb Bryant
  • Danese Cooper
  • L. Peter Deutsch
  • Raph Levien
  • Zooko
  • Your Name Here...

Sources / Acknowledgements

  • Simon Phipps
  • Stefano Maffulli
  • Nick Vidal
  • Bastian Greshake Tzovaras
  • Sam Ramji
  • Heather Meeker
  • Abby Kearns
  • Alex Scammon