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work.md 3.69 KiB

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:

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