From 071d079a978a64b1e6751214cf507046812693e5 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Seth Schoen <schoen@loyalty.org>
Date: Sat, 28 Oct 2023 21:59:04 -0700
Subject: [PATCH] Add some general overall taxonomy material

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+# Other terminology
+
+Lawrence Rosen used the term "eventual source" and says that L. Peter Deutsch
+used "eventual licensing" in connection with Ghostscript.
+
+Creative Commons referred to "springing licenses" ("a legal mechanism for
+granting a license that automatically springs into life at a future date").
+A concrete example which CC proposed (but no longer suggests or operates)
+is the "Founders' Copyright", which attempted to make copyrighted works
+functionally public domain following a period of 14 or 28 years after
+initial publication, inspired by provisions of 1790 U.S. copyright
+legislation.
+
+# Things that are DOSP
+
+* Springing licenses that automatically convert after a particular delay
+
+* A promise to (explicitly or manually) relicense older versions on a predictable schedule, when this promise is made and complied with
+
+# Things that are adjacent to DOSP
+
+* Bounty and buy-out mechanisms
+
+Many people have proposed bounty mechanisms, or investment structures like
+assurance contracts, which would allow a proprietary codebase to be "bought
+out" by a community of prospective users (or philanthropists).  In these
+scenarios, developers would typically receive a large one-time payment in
+exchange for switching an existing codebase from a proprietary to an
+open-source licensing model.  There has been considerable theoretical
+interest in structures and mechanisms for funding public goods, several
+of which assume that creative work will be proprietary by default, either
+initially or if a public funding attempt fails.
+
+[note about Blender story]
+
+Buy-out mechanisms are potentially adjacent to DOSP when the public knows
+ahead of time that there is a specific path available to convert
+particular software's licensing.
+
+* Ted Ts'o's TPL
+
+In 2003, Ted Ts'o proposed a license which lets recipients redistribute
+derived works under BSD-like terms for a specified period of time, and
+which then later automatically imposes a GPL-like obligation on them
+after a delay.  He suggests that this is a compromise between benefits
+of permissive and reciprocal licensing models.  This is framed as allowing
+downstream developers (not the original licensor) to temporarily, but not
+permanently, publish their modified versions under proprietary licensing
+terms.
+
+This seems to be the same concept as the Transitive Grace Period Public
+License (TGPPL), which (for example in
+https://tahoe-lafs.org/~zooko/tgppl.pdf) was described as a time-based
+compromise between GPL and BSD licensing models.  TGPPL later became
+the Bootstrap Open Source License (BOSL).
+
+It's important to note that this is focused on temporarily granting
+(immediate) recipients of code rights intermediate between those of BSD
+and GPL models, as distinct from BUSL, which temporarily grants everyone
+reduced rights relative to open sources.  The TPL, TGPPL, and BOSL models
+focus on economic incentives of downstream software development using
+a code base, while the BUSL focuses on economic incentives of the upstream
+developer itself.
+
+(As a result, BOSL claims to already be an open source license -- as
+recipients of the original code already receive full rights that comply
+with the Open Source Definition -- while BUSL does not claim to be an
+open source license.)
+
+* Springing licenses that trigger in some way other than a fixed time delay
+
+We have at least one example of an anti-abandonware license that states
+that the license will convert to a specified open source liense under
+conditions indicating that the upstream developer has ceased development
+or has ceased operating.
+
+* An informal habit of releasing older software as open source after its
+  presumed period of commercial viability
+
+This is seen with id Games and some other game developers, as well as
+historic versions of some major proprietary operating systems.  This may
+be habitual on the developers' part or a response to outside community
+requests, but it is not concretely pre-planned or pre-announced, and
+there is no way for the public to rely on it or guarantee that a particular
+organization's relicensing practice will continue.
+
+See also
+
+https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_video_games_with_later_released_source_code
+
+(collecting examples of this practice); as noted there, the work as
+whole is often not actually relicensed as open source (as "artwork and
+data are often released under a different license than the source code").
+
+* Initial proprietary publication for mainly non-economic reasons, with an open-ended pledge to adopt an open source license in the future
+
+Several projects have been published initially under a proprietary license
+for reasons such as embarrassment over code quality, doubts about code
+security, or a desire to wait until a governance or funding structure has
+been selected and implemented.  Their developers have stated unequivocally
+that they prefer and intend to eventually make the projects open source,
+but this statement may not offer any concrete schedule or conditions,
+and is presumably not enforceable.
+
+# Things that are akin to DOSP in other fields or contexts
+
+* Springing licenses by academic journals
+
+Some academic journal publishers are applying springing licenses which
+permit (at least) gratis public access to the full text of articles after a
+fixed delay.  The delay is stated to protect the commercial interest of the
+publisher by incentivizing organizations to pay for journal subscriptions.
+
+The end license terms are not always akin to open source licenses, as
+examples include CC-BY-NC and CC-BY-NC-ND.
+
+The delay in this case is pre-announced and is apparently intended to be
+legally binding, and may often form a part of the contract between the
+publisher and the authors, based on the presumption that academic authors
+prefer to allow less-restrictive access to their work.
+
+* Government investments with time-limited exclusivity
+
+# Other things that remind people of DOSP
+
+* One-off decisions to relicense a proprietary project
+
+Many of these have become very famous, but since there was no explicit
+prior intention to make them open source, they don't really fit into
+the DOSP concept.
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