Tgppl, a new type of open-source license

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&#x27;t get approval. Since it thus isn&#x27;t an open-source license, why present it as such in article title - starting out dishonest is probably not a good idea.<p>If I&#x27;m wrong and it is approved by OSI, that info should probably be more prominent in the blog post.<p>EDIT: indeed, both the 2008 mailing list post and this blog post call it &quot;Transitive Grace Period Public Licence v. 1.0&quot;.<p>EDIT2: to be more constructive, a more proper way to describe the license could perhaps be &quot;open-source-like&quot;.<p>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.

Well I&#x27;m skeptical, but at least unlike 99% of &quot;radically new type of open-source license[s]&quot; I <i>think</i> this one is actually, y&#x27;know, an open source license and not shared source pretending otherwise. If I&#x27;m reading &quot;External Deployment&quot; correctly, it&#x27;s sorta like AGPL but with a time delay, which is... Not terrible, really.

Haven&#x27;t gone line-by-line on this one, but I like the new trend of &quot;time limit&quot; licenses. If I&#x27;m trying to start a business, something AGPL-ish might make sense in the short term to avoid bigger competitors copying everything we&#x27;re doing. But that doesn&#x27;t mean I want my great-grandchildren to be able to sue for violations 90 years from now. &quot;AGPL for now, MIT later&quot; seems like a good compromise.

This seems like a fundamentally bad idea for software.<p>Simply put, living software contains a constant stream of patches, which &quot;reset&quot; the clock continuously.<p>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.<p>With software, the only time that happens if after the software is abandoned. At that point, there&#x27;s rarely many people interested in using it anyhow.

&quot;ECC released its implementation of Halo 2 under the TGPPL license.&quot;<p>This had me confused and excited for a second. Alas, it&#x27;s hot the Halo 2 I was thinking of.

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.

<i>“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.”</i><p>Depends on the time limit. US copyright was once 23 years, now it&#x27;s 95-120 years in the US. If this is for 1 year, well, maybe. If it&#x27;s for 10 years, no.<p>And can it be &quot;evergreened&quot;, with the time limit running out 1 year after the most recent change? (See MPEG-LA for how to do that.)

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?

Can someone summarize in like 2 sentences what this license is trying to solve?<p>The article mentions underfunding, but since this is a license and not a price tag I don&#x27;t see how this is going to change that. Also from the comments it reads like this is going to limit usage within &quot;big $$$ cloud providers&quot;. Well, my wild guess would be that such projects would get even less attention (read as: money) then.

Reminds me of Sentry&#x27;s model: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.sentry.io&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;06&#x2F;relicensing-sentry" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.sentry.io&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;06&#x2F;relicensing-sentry</a>

I&#x27;ve never understood why there isn&#x27;t a dev framework to allow users to &quot;unlock&quot; certain FOSS features.<p>E.g., you scroll through a list of already implemented&#x2F;tested features that are stored somewhere that isn&#x27;t publicly accessible, perhaps with demo videos if it&#x27;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.<p>If it&#x27;s served by the same maintainers who run the project then there&#x27;s no trust issues with it.

Sounds radicałly similar to: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kde.org&#x2F;community&#x2F;whatiskde&#x2F;kdefreeqtfoundation.php" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kde.org&#x2F;community&#x2F;whatiskde&#x2F;kdefreeqtfoundation.php</a>

This doesn&#x27;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&#x27;t involve changes to the product code directly) aren&#x27;t affected.

&gt;Radically...<p>I vaguely remember reading a similar Open Source License, but couldn&#x27;t google it.<p>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?<p>It feels to me a solution looking for problem.

This is just more license proliferation and a solution to a nonexistent problem. Releasing software under a license like the GPL doesn&#x27;t somehow prevent you from making money from it. See Ardour - GPLv2, paid binaries.