6 ms·

Tgppl, a new type of open-source license

76 points by erwan 6y ago

yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
Well I'm skeptical, but at least unlike 99% of "radically new type of open-source license[s]" I think this one is actually, y'know, an open source license and not shared source pretending otherwise. If I'm reading "External Deployment" correctly, it's sorta like AGPL but with a time delay, which is... Not terrible, really.
samfisher83 6y ago
This license sort of sounds like a patent. The creators get to make some money for a little while and then it gives everyone access to the software.
- onei 6y ago
  That was my impression too. However, where a patent expires, I couldn't see when the source code had to be released by. Seems a bit problematic if that is the case. I also don't see a substantial difference to just releasing the source code at a later date under a open source license when the copyright holder chooses to.
- wnbc 6y ago
  Yes, I think that's the objective for the licence. Reading slightly more into the product (Halo 2), they would benefit from more adoption by others as it could facilitate cross-chain interoperation. The license model gives everyone equal access to the code, and equal rights to improve Halo commercially (make money?) with the promise that they subsequently open-source their improvements after 12 months. This license model fits this product quite well.
- moonchild 6y ago
  In fact, it almost sounds like copyright—or, would have, if not for disney.
kaszanka 6y ago
This is just more license proliferation and a solution to a nonexistent problem. Releasing software under a license like the GPL doesn't somehow prevent you from making money from it. See Ardour - GPLv2, paid binaries.
- duckerude 6y ago
  It doesn't entirely prevent you from making money, but it can make it harder. Even the FSF acknowledges this. See for example "Proprietary software developers have the advantage of money" on https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
  ... and collecting US$17-20k per month (post COVID19 expansion, or was it just version 6.0?)
  - raphlinus 6y ago
    Super! My understand is that Krita's distribution through app stores has a similar flavor - it's pure GPL, no tricks, but people pay for the convenience and assurance of downloading the official version of the app. My personal feeling is that as PC's become more locked down and less under user control, paying for the digitally signed version might increasingly become a viable business model. Trademarks and TOS enforcement might be a more effective moat against being undercut than copyrights and licenses.
- detaro 6y ago
  One example of a project working with existing licenses doesn't mean that there isn't a problem. And they don't claim that it entirely "prevent[s] you from making money from it". (Although I'm not convinced this license is a good solution, need to take a deeper look)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- franga2000 6y ago
nsajko 6y ago
This (under the same name and version 1.0) has already been presented to FSF and OSI in the 2000s and 2010 on their mailing lists and other places, so I guess it didn't get approval. Since it thus isn't an open-source license, why present it as such in article title - starting out dishonest is probably not a good idea. If I'm wrong and it is approved by OSI, that info should probably be more prominent in the blog post. EDIT: indeed, both the 2008 mailing list post and this blog post call it "Transitive Grace Period Public Licence v. 1.0". EDIT2: to be more constructive, a more proper way to describe the license could perhaps be "open-source-like". EDIT3: framing this as an issue of honesty was a mistake, because Zooko or whoever can hold whatever opinion they like. It is a big issue anyways, see downthread if not convinced.
- geofft 6y ago
  There's a number of other reasons the OSI doesn't approve licenses, such as avoiding license proliferation https://opensource.org/proliferation https://opensource.org/proliferation . As a simple example, there are a huge number of variants of the 4-clause BSD licenses where the advertising clause lists more and more people besides the University of California; they're all open-source licenses under the Open Source Definition, but the OSI isn't interested in promoting them, because including all of those advertising clauses is a pain. I think this post is not claiming that the license is (yet) approved by OSI, but it is claiming that it's an open source license under the OSD.
  - nsajko 6y ago
    Still, the claim of "open source" or "libre" or "free software" doesn't hold water effectively if there is nobody to verify it (lawyers are probably needed, too). License proliferation is a separate issue. BTW, the OSI people on their mailing list weren't convinced that the license is conformant (during the grace period) in 2008, 2009, or 2013. Hypothetically there could have been a change of heart since, but I can't know either way without much more research. My main point is that there is a lack of transparency in the linked blog post about the license by ECC (Zooko?). EDIT: If someone wants to choose this (or any other) license, it is important for them to know if it is legally sound, how compatible it is with other licenses/project, and possibly also what are the prospects for the license's future adoption in the "market". Approval by FSF or OSI gives some assurance with all of those. Without that everyone involved with software licensed under the license will just lose time, unless hypothetically TGPPL makes it really big, big enough for everyone to switch from FSF and OSI approved licenses to TGPPL.
ksec 6y ago
>Radically... I vaguely remember reading a similar Open Source License, but couldn't google it. And it reads very AGPL like. Which may be a big no no for many Cooperation and Enterprise. And what if the Author Set a Grace Period of 50 years or longer? It feels to me a solution looking for problem.
- janoc 6y ago
  It is a solution for people who want to keep their software proprietary because they think they can't make money out of it if it is open source. All the while they get to claim credit for it being "open source". The problem is that this license completely obliterates the major points of OSS licenses - which are open collaboration and security. Nobody is going to contribute and fix bugs in old versions of the software which may not even work anymore (e.g. because some underlying protocol or infrastructure have changed already).
linkdd 6y ago
Reminds me of Sentry's model: https://blog.sentry.io/2019/11/06/relicensing-sentry https://blog.sentry.io/2019/11/06/relicensing-sentry
- gregwebs 6y ago
  Their BSL has a 3 year period (whereas this license has a 1 year period). Sentry also admit it is by definition not an open source license since it has restrictions on particular uses. TGGPL claims to be open source and probably is because everyone gets the same rights. But you are always potentially looking at code that is a year behind.
jancsika 6y ago
I've never understood why there isn't a dev framework to allow users to "unlock" certain FOSS features. E.g., you scroll through a list of already implemented/tested features that are stored somewhere that isn't publicly accessible, perhaps with demo videos if it's UI stuff. Each one is priced. If someone pays the price, then the source for the feature gets automerged (if possible) and ships with the next version of the software. If it's served by the same maintainers who run the project then there's no trust issues with it.
- egypturnash 6y ago
  So you want developers to spend a lot of time making new features on spec?
  - jancsika 6y ago
    That's what FOSS developers already do. It's just that typically they don't get paid for it at all.
StavrosK 6y ago
Can someone better-versed in legalese explain how this works? What is the restriction before the 12 months (and what happens after that?). Say I make money from the code, what about the contributors? Do they contribute code and get nothing for it, or am I supposed to pay them a cut?
- Gaelan 6y ago
  If I'm reading the blog post right, it's essentially MIT for 12 months after you make changes, then (A?)GPL after. (To be clear, not those actual licenses.)
Animats 6y ago
“Congress shall have power… to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.” Depends on the time limit. US copyright was once 23 years, now it's 95-120 years in the US. If this is for 1 year, well, maybe. If it's for 10 years, no. And can it be "evergreened", with the time limit running out 1 year after the most recent change? (See MPEG-LA for how to do that.)
jopsen 6y ago
Sounds radicałly similar to: https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php
iameli 6y ago
Haven't gone line-by-line on this one, but I like the new trend of "time limit" licenses. If I'm trying to start a business, something AGPL-ish might make sense in the short term to avoid bigger competitors copying everything we're doing. But that doesn't mean I want my great-grandchildren to be able to sue for violations 90 years from now. "AGPL for now, MIT later" seems like a good compromise.
- tptacek 6y ago
  You don't really need a new kind of license for that; you can just AGPL now, and release MIT later (assuming you're assigned the copyright for all the code).
  - pas 6y ago
    That doesn't guarantee downstream users that later they'll in fact have the code as MIT licensed. The author can change their minds, or just thinks it isn't worth the hassle. (Or some big corp buys them and they won't care.)
    - t0astbread 6y ago
      Isn't that always the case if the author is the sole copyright holder (or all copyright holders agree)? (Meaning that regardless of the license the copyright holder can always choose to not distribute new versions under that license anymore.)
      - pas 6y ago
        But that's completely different than having a released version that we know will be available as MIT in X months. It might mean you can start developing something based on the code and when it becomes MIT you can launch it and keep your additions to yourself. (Let's say in case of a server side thing.)
    - kelnos 6y ago
      Is it difficult legally to draft a meta-license that says "This work is licensed under X upon release; Y months after release it will be licensed under the terms of Z"? Presumably you'd have to also specify what it means to do a non-release pull from their git repository -- when does that particular git commit switch to Z -- but that can't be too hard. Just make the clock not start ticking until a release is made, and if you want a safety valve for the case that someone wants to fork, or if the company folds and doesn't make any more releases, you can have a clause where it switches to Z after N*Y months or something, where N is chosen with an understanding of the usual release cadence. I could understand how all this might be legally risky for another company to base their business on software licensed like this, but I kinda think that's ok. If we're talking about X=AGPL and Z=MIT, I imagine many non-corporate developers would be happy to use the software under the AGPL, while corporate types will -- as intended -- be more likely to use (for example) the developer's enterprise hosted version, or some other paid self-hosting agreement.
nordsieck 6y ago
This seems like a fundamentally bad idea for software. Simply put, living software contains a constant stream of patches, which "reset" the clock continuously. It would be one thing if this license were used on a book or some other work which is substantially finished. Once the book is published, the clock starts ticking and users eventually get to the MIT pot of gold at the end of the timer. With software, the only time that happens if after the software is abandoned. At that point, there's rarely many people interested in using it anyhow.
- GranPC 6y ago
  I haven't read the license fully, but wouldn't that just mean you would be able to use releases that are older than the time period specified?
  - nordsieck 6y ago
    > wouldn't that just mean you would be able to use releases that are older than the time period specified? That is a fair point. Depending on the type of software and the frequency of bug fixes that may be a more or less reasonable strategy. Also, in case you haven't read the license, the time period is 12 months.
  - rpdillon 6y ago
    That's my reading as well. It's actually kind of funny to me: the term of copyright has grown so long that folks are essentially looking for ways to reimplement reasonable copyright term length inside of the construct of copyright protection itself.
- Animats 6y ago
  Yes, that looks like a problem: ...to distribute or communicate copies of the Original Work and Derivative Works to the public, with the proviso that copies of Original Work or Derivative Works that You distribute or communicate shall be licensed under this Transitive Grace Period Public Licence no later than 12 months after You distributed or communicated said copies It looks like the effect is that the public versions must always lag a year behind the proprietary versions. So, this isn't open source, although it is abandonware protection.
yissp 6y ago
"ECC released its implementation of Halo 2 under the TGPPL license." This had me confused and excited for a second. Alas, it's hot the Halo 2 I was thinking of.
numlock86 6y ago
Can someone summarize in like 2 sentences what this license is trying to solve? The article mentions underfunding, but since this is a license and not a price tag I don't see how this is going to change that. Also from the comments it reads like this is going to limit usage within "big $$$ cloud providers". Well, my wild guess would be that such projects would get even less attention (read as: money) then.
dathanb82 6y ago
This doesn't seem like it actually solves the capture problem, though. The most egregious cases I can think of of third-party capture involve taking a project, bundling it with infrastructure, and offering it via a SaaS model (obviously thinking of Kafka, Elastichsearch, Postgres, MySQL, etc. via AWS). Only direct modifications to the project source are covered by the license, right? So the infrastructure code that make it easy to create instances of the product (but don't involve changes to the product code directly) aren't affected.

76 points by erwan 6y ago

Well I'm skeptical, but at least unlike 99% of "radically new type of open-source license[s]" I think this one is actually, y'know, an open source license and not shared source pretending otherwise. If I'm reading "External Deployment" correctly, it's sorta like AGPL but with a time delay, which is... Not terrible, really.

samfisher83 6y ago

This license sort of sounds like a patent. The creators get to make some money for a little while and then it gives everyone access to the software.

onei 6y ago
That was my impression too. However, where a patent expires, I couldn't see when the source code had to be released by. Seems a bit problematic if that is the case. I also don't see a substantial difference to just releasing the source code at a later date under a open source license when the copyright holder chooses to.
wnbc 6y ago
Yes, I think that's the objective for the licence. Reading slightly more into the product (Halo 2), they would benefit from more adoption by others as it could facilitate cross-chain interoperation. The license model gives everyone equal access to the code, and equal rights to improve Halo commercially (make money?) with the promise that they subsequently open-source their improvements after 12 months. This license model fits this product quite well.
moonchild 6y ago
In fact, it almost sounds like copyright—or, would have, if not for disney.

kaszanka 6y ago

This is just more license proliferation and a solution to a nonexistent problem. Releasing software under a license like the GPL doesn't somehow prevent you from making money from it. See Ardour - GPLv2, paid binaries.

duckerude 6y ago
It doesn't entirely prevent you from making money, but it can make it harder. Even the FSF acknowledges this. See for example "Proprietary software developers have the advantage of money" on https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html.
PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
... and collecting US$17-20k per month (post COVID19 expansion, or was it just version 6.0?)
- raphlinus 6y ago
  Super! My understand is that Krita's distribution through app stores has a similar flavor - it's pure GPL, no tricks, but people pay for the convenience and assurance of downloading the official version of the app. My personal feeling is that as PC's become more locked down and less under user control, paying for the digitally signed version might increasingly become a viable business model. Trademarks and TOS enforcement might be a more effective moat against being undercut than copyrights and licenses.
detaro 6y ago
One example of a project working with existing licenses doesn't mean that there isn't a problem. And they don't claim that it entirely "prevent[s] you from making money from it". (Although I'm not convinced this license is a good solution, need to take a deeper look)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
franga2000 6y ago

nsajko 6y ago

This (under the same name and version 1.0) has already been presented to FSF and OSI in the 2000s and 2010 on their mailing lists and other places, so I guess it didn't get approval. Since it thus isn't an open-source license, why present it as such in article title - starting out dishonest is probably not a good idea. If I'm wrong and it is approved by OSI, that info should probably be more prominent in the blog post. EDIT: indeed, both the 2008 mailing list post and this blog post call it "Transitive Grace Period Public Licence v. 1.0". EDIT2: to be more constructive, a more proper way to describe the license could perhaps be "open-source-like". EDIT3: framing this as an issue of honesty was a mistake, because Zooko or whoever can hold whatever opinion they like. It is a big issue anyways, see downthread if not convinced.

geofft 6y ago
There's a number of other reasons the OSI doesn't approve licenses, such as avoiding license proliferation https://opensource.org/proliferation https://opensource.org/proliferation . As a simple example, there are a huge number of variants of the 4-clause BSD licenses where the advertising clause lists more and more people besides the University of California; they're all open-source licenses under the Open Source Definition, but the OSI isn't interested in promoting them, because including all of those advertising clauses is a pain. I think this post is not claiming that the license is (yet) approved by OSI, but it is claiming that it's an open source license under the OSD.
- nsajko 6y ago
  Still, the claim of "open source" or "libre" or "free software" doesn't hold water effectively if there is nobody to verify it (lawyers are probably needed, too). License proliferation is a separate issue. BTW, the OSI people on their mailing list weren't convinced that the license is conformant (during the grace period) in 2008, 2009, or 2013. Hypothetically there could have been a change of heart since, but I can't know either way without much more research. My main point is that there is a lack of transparency in the linked blog post about the license by ECC (Zooko?). EDIT: If someone wants to choose this (or any other) license, it is important for them to know if it is legally sound, how compatible it is with other licenses/project, and possibly also what are the prospects for the license's future adoption in the "market". Approval by FSF or OSI gives some assurance with all of those. Without that everyone involved with software licensed under the license will just lose time, unless hypothetically TGPPL makes it really big, big enough for everyone to switch from FSF and OSI approved licenses to TGPPL.

ksec 6y ago

>Radically... I vaguely remember reading a similar Open Source License, but couldn't google it. And it reads very AGPL like. Which may be a big no no for many Cooperation and Enterprise. And what if the Author Set a Grace Period of 50 years or longer? It feels to me a solution looking for problem.

janoc 6y ago
It is a solution for people who want to keep their software proprietary because they think they can't make money out of it if it is open source. All the while they get to claim credit for it being "open source". The problem is that this license completely obliterates the major points of OSS licenses - which are open collaboration and security. Nobody is going to contribute and fix bugs in old versions of the software which may not even work anymore (e.g. because some underlying protocol or infrastructure have changed already).

linkdd 6y ago

Reminds me of Sentry's model: https://blog.sentry.io/2019/11/06/relicensing-sentry https://blog.sentry.io/2019/11/06/relicensing-sentry

gregwebs 6y ago
Their BSL has a 3 year period (whereas this license has a 1 year period). Sentry also admit it is by definition not an open source license since it has restrictions on particular uses. TGGPL claims to be open source and probably is because everyone gets the same rights. But you are always potentially looking at code that is a year behind.

jancsika 6y ago

I've never understood why there isn't a dev framework to allow users to "unlock" certain FOSS features. E.g., you scroll through a list of already implemented/tested features that are stored somewhere that isn't publicly accessible, perhaps with demo videos if it's UI stuff. Each one is priced. If someone pays the price, then the source for the feature gets automerged (if possible) and ships with the next version of the software. If it's served by the same maintainers who run the project then there's no trust issues with it.

egypturnash 6y ago
So you want developers to spend a lot of time making new features on spec?
- jancsika 6y ago
  That's what FOSS developers already do. It's just that typically they don't get paid for it at all.

StavrosK 6y ago

Can someone better-versed in legalese explain how this works? What is the restriction before the 12 months (and what happens after that?). Say I make money from the code, what about the contributors? Do they contribute code and get nothing for it, or am I supposed to pay them a cut?

Gaelan 6y ago
If I'm reading the blog post right, it's essentially MIT for 12 months after you make changes, then (A?)GPL after. (To be clear, not those actual licenses.)

Animats 6y ago

“Congress shall have power… to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.” Depends on the time limit. US copyright was once 23 years, now it's 95-120 years in the US. If this is for 1 year, well, maybe. If it's for 10 years, no. And can it be "evergreened", with the time limit running out 1 year after the most recent change? (See MPEG-LA for how to do that.)

jopsen 6y ago

Sounds radicałly similar to: https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php

iameli 6y ago

Haven't gone line-by-line on this one, but I like the new trend of "time limit" licenses. If I'm trying to start a business, something AGPL-ish might make sense in the short term to avoid bigger competitors copying everything we're doing. But that doesn't mean I want my great-grandchildren to be able to sue for violations 90 years from now. "AGPL for now, MIT later" seems like a good compromise.

tptacek 6y ago
You don't really need a new kind of license for that; you can just AGPL now, and release MIT later (assuming you're assigned the copyright for all the code).
- pas 6y ago
  That doesn't guarantee downstream users that later they'll in fact have the code as MIT licensed. The author can change their minds, or just thinks it isn't worth the hassle. (Or some big corp buys them and they won't care.)
  - t0astbread 6y ago
    Isn't that always the case if the author is the sole copyright holder (or all copyright holders agree)? (Meaning that regardless of the license the copyright holder can always choose to not distribute new versions under that license anymore.)
    - pas 6y ago
      But that's completely different than having a released version that we know will be available as MIT in X months. It might mean you can start developing something based on the code and when it becomes MIT you can launch it and keep your additions to yourself. (Let's say in case of a server side thing.)
  - kelnos 6y ago
    Is it difficult legally to draft a meta-license that says "This work is licensed under X upon release; Y months after release it will be licensed under the terms of Z"? Presumably you'd have to also specify what it means to do a non-release pull from their git repository -- when does that particular git commit switch to Z -- but that can't be too hard. Just make the clock not start ticking until a release is made, and if you want a safety valve for the case that someone wants to fork, or if the company folds and doesn't make any more releases, you can have a clause where it switches to Z after N*Y months or something, where N is chosen with an understanding of the usual release cadence. I could understand how all this might be legally risky for another company to base their business on software licensed like this, but I kinda think that's ok. If we're talking about X=AGPL and Z=MIT, I imagine many non-corporate developers would be happy to use the software under the AGPL, while corporate types will -- as intended -- be more likely to use (for example) the developer's enterprise hosted version, or some other paid self-hosting agreement.

nordsieck 6y ago

This seems like a fundamentally bad idea for software. Simply put, living software contains a constant stream of patches, which "reset" the clock continuously. It would be one thing if this license were used on a book or some other work which is substantially finished. Once the book is published, the clock starts ticking and users eventually get to the MIT pot of gold at the end of the timer. With software, the only time that happens if after the software is abandoned. At that point, there's rarely many people interested in using it anyhow.

GranPC 6y ago
I haven't read the license fully, but wouldn't that just mean you would be able to use releases that are older than the time period specified?
- nordsieck 6y ago
  > wouldn't that just mean you would be able to use releases that are older than the time period specified? That is a fair point. Depending on the type of software and the frequency of bug fixes that may be a more or less reasonable strategy. Also, in case you haven't read the license, the time period is 12 months.
- rpdillon 6y ago
  That's my reading as well. It's actually kind of funny to me: the term of copyright has grown so long that folks are essentially looking for ways to reimplement reasonable copyright term length inside of the construct of copyright protection itself.
Animats 6y ago
Yes, that looks like a problem: ...to distribute or communicate copies of the Original Work and Derivative Works to the public, with the proviso that copies of Original Work or Derivative Works that You distribute or communicate shall be licensed under this Transitive Grace Period Public Licence no later than 12 months after You distributed or communicated said copies It looks like the effect is that the public versions must always lag a year behind the proprietary versions. So, this isn't open source, although it is abandonware protection.

yissp 6y ago

"ECC released its implementation of Halo 2 under the TGPPL license." This had me confused and excited for a second. Alas, it's hot the Halo 2 I was thinking of.

numlock86 6y ago

Can someone summarize in like 2 sentences what this license is trying to solve? The article mentions underfunding, but since this is a license and not a price tag I don't see how this is going to change that. Also from the comments it reads like this is going to limit usage within "big $$$ cloud providers". Well, my wild guess would be that such projects would get even less attention (read as: money) then.

dathanb82 6y ago

This doesn't seem like it actually solves the capture problem, though. The most egregious cases I can think of of third-party capture involve taking a project, bundling it with infrastructure, and offering it via a SaaS model (obviously thinking of Kafka, Elastichsearch, Postgres, MySQL, etc. via AWS). Only direct modifications to the project source are covered by the license, right? So the infrastructure code that make it easy to create instances of the product (but don't involve changes to the product code directly) aren't affected.