Research on delayed open source publication (DOSP): the practice of publishing a software release under a proprietary license initially, then later (usually in a planned fashion) publishing that release's source code under an open source license.

While delayed open source publication been somewhat rare, there are some examples of it across the history of open source -- in fact, some of the examples (e.g., Aladdin Ghostscript) predate the coining of the term "open source". To the best of our knowledge, when software authors have done this it has usually been in a fairly predictable way. For example, when release N goes out under a proprietary license, release N-1 is then (re)published under an open source license.

This repository is a collection of research, and eventually a whitepaper, about various examples of DOSP and show how they are alike or different. We will also analyze the effects (if any) of this practice generally on open source as a field. Our purpose is to provide accurate historical description and objective analysis; our work here represents no position on the desirability or undesirability of delayed open source publication.

This research is supported by the Open Source Initiative (OSI).

Terminology

We are not necessarily settled on the term "delayed open source publication". If you can suggest a better term for the phenomenon, please let us know.

Contributing

You can email us at dosp-research {_AT_} opensource.org or file a ticket to contact us.

To build the whitepaper from LaTeX source, you will need to use OTS DocTools. Note that the whitepaper is still a work in progress. Please do not cite the draft nor quote from it in public forums yet. We'll remove this notice when the paper is ready for publication.