Skip to content
Snippets Groups Projects
Select Git revision
  • main default protected
1 result
Blame Permalink
notes.md 12.51 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.

Examples

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

  • The license now named the "Bootstrap 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

  • Akka (BUSL) license FAQ

    They moved to BSL last year; after 3 years, code switches from BSL to Apache 2.0. From their blog post:

    ... The new license for Akka is the Business Source License (BSL) v1.1, with an additional usage grant to cover some open source usage of Akka, such as part of the Play Framework. The BSL was created by David Axmark and Michael Widenius and has been adopted by MariaDB, Cockroach Labs, Sentry, Materialized, and others.

    The BSL is a “Source Available” license that freely allows using the code for development and other non-production work such as testing. Production use of the software requires a commercial license from Lightbend. The commercial license will be available at no charge for early-stage companies (less than US $25 million in annual revenue). By enabling early-stage companies to use Akka in production for free, we hope to continue to foster the innovation synonymous with the startup adoption of Akka.

    After 3 years, the BSL license indefinitely reverts to an Apache 2.0 license. A detailed FAQ is available to answer many of the questions that you will have about the license change. You can see our version of the BSL here. ...

  • 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.

  • BerkeleyDB and Sleepycat?

    Probably not DOSP: simultaneous dual license.

  • CockroachDB (BUSL) licensing FAQs

  • FreeBSD netgraph

    Have not found any reference to licensing so far.

  • 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"

  • 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.

  • Hashicorp and BUSL

  • MariaDB

    Always GPL. People may be thinking of the company's development of BUSL which was applied to other software (MaxScale).

  • MindLogger from Child Mind Institute

    YES: Delayed open source (noncommercial uses only) with a three-year delay.

  • MkDocs

  • North Road (geospatial software company) projects

    @jjgreen followed up in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37745772 to say: "North Road's SLYR (ESRI to QGIS Compatibility Suite) does that (and rather good code it is too). https://north-road.com/slyr/ . I see North Road is actually on your list, but eventual openness not obvious. I think that's clear for SLYR at least."

    ---> Follows bounty method with scheduled six-month delay.

  • Onivim 2 (was this unplanned?) issue see also https://v2.onivim.io/early-access-portal and https://github.com/onivim/oni2/issues/3811#issuecomment-910306404 for additional history

  • 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.)

    C.f. the situation with video game development, as Seth noted.

  • OPSI "co-funding" (see also this forum link)

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

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

  • PKMN Classic Framework (a reverse-engineered third-party Pokémon game server?) has a conditional relicensing if the developer's official server instance goes offline in the future

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

  • "searchcode" server under an "eventually open license" according to the post GPL Time-bomb an interesting approach to #FOSS licensing by Ben Boyter.

  • Sentry (Business Source License (BUSL)); Codecov (also from Sentry) is also BUSL.

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

  • Zed

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

Not software

  • Rockefeller University Press Journal of Cell Biology has a delayed open access policy with delayed relicensing of academic journal articles (although the end license is a noncommercial Creative Commons license so it would not be considered open source)

  • Maybe there are other examples of delayed open access in journals with formal relicensing that would be considered fully open source (if the articles were software)?

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