Notes from Seth/James/Karl meeting today

work.md

+# 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