notes.md

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.

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')".

Examples

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

• The license now named the "Boostrap Open Source License" (BOSL) was formerly known as the "Transitive Grace Period Public Licence" (TGPPL).

  The 2020 blog post Introducing BOSL, a radically new type of open-source license discusses the 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….

  Tahoe-LAFS seems to have a somewhat complicated (though still open source) licensing situation, but it appears to be also published under the TGPPL?

  And Zooko might be using BOSL or TGPPL for other things as well. (See also https://github.com/zooko/tgppl -- note that Richard Fontana is in the commit history there.)

• Aladdin Ghostscript

• Sleepycat and BerkeleyDB?

• Sentry (Business Source License (BUSL)).

• Codecov (also from Sentry) is also BUSL.

  See https://blog.sentry.io/lets-talk-about-open-source/.

• The post Why Open Source Matters from RedMonk (Aug 2023) points to some other examples. (Also, it's a really good post, in Karl's opinion, not that anyone asked him, but hey, if you're editing the notes file then you get to insert your opinions.)

• Hashicorp and BUSL

  • https://www.hashicorp.com/license-faq#Why-is-HashiCorp-making-this-change
  • https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/hashicorp-adopts-business-source-license

• Child Mind Institute's MindLogger

  • uses its self-rolled "Delayed Open Source Attribution License"
  • license file on GH

• Akka (BUSL) license FAQ

• CockroachDB (BUSL) licensing FAQs

• FreeBSD netgraph

• MariaDB

• MkDocs

• "northroadgeo" projects delayed open source mechanism not immediately clear?

• Onivim 2 (was this unplanned?) issue

• OPSI ["co-funding"](https://www.opsi.org/de/dokumentation/opsi-lizenz-und-copyright https://forum.opsi.org/viewtopic.php?t=1193)

• OTRS (open source -> delayed -> proprietary)

• Pixelfed "will be open sourced when we reach v1"

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

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".

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.

• https://kfogel.org/notice/AZSlnFS0GBe2x7Rd6u
• https://twitter.com/kfogel/status/1699104095976423795
• https://chat.opentechstrategies.com/#narrow/stream/2-general/topic/DOSP/near/172793

Resources to check

• Free Software Business (fsb) mailing list archives at https://web.archive.org/web/20210000000000\*/http://www.crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi/0/

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
• Heather Meeker
• Abby Kearns
• Sam Ramji
• Your Name Here...

Sources / Acknowledgements

• Simon Phipps
• Stefano Maffulli
• Nick Vidal
• Bastian Greshake Tzovaras