Ask HN: How about delayed MIT/GPL?

5 points by afiori 39 days ago | 7 comments

One way a company can protect an open-source product from large cloud providers is to restrict the license to forbid some commercial uses, typically offering the software as a service.

The community and programmers in general almost always dislike these moves.

One thing I have seen little discussion of is clauses like: "after N years, this license becomes MIT/GPL."

To me, this seems to solve most of the practical issues, while obviously doing little to address software-freedom or boiling-frog concerns.

Do you agree? Would such a clause change your opinion?

torstenvl 39 days ago |

Prior to that date, presumably it would be under some proprietary license, right?

That means two things:

(1) It'll be difficult to manage community changes and proprietary changes (they might even be mutually exclusive or get on different trajectories). Ultimately this model probably means little to no open contribution, little to no community.

(2) There is nothing actually forcing the open source release.

If this is something one is interested in doing, it should be woven into the AOO/AOI/OA/bylaws with an enforcement mechanism. E.g., explicitly acknowledge that the corporation is directed to treat the trust of the open source community as among the highest goods, open source has to happen at a certain interval (you might choose 14 years, modeled after the original copyright term).

You might even create structures to enforce this, e.g., SPI has a board seat with no power except to force a vote on not releasing changes on schedule, and that such a decision requires a 3/4 majority or something.

afiori 39 days ago | |

> (2) There is nothing actually forcing the open source release.

the anti-cloud-use license would include it, with no need of a separate release

torstenvl 31 days ago | | |

What? How exactly would you make that work in practice?

Are you going to release the source on day one?

Because good luck trying to convince the board to pay for source escrow.

And if you don't do any of those things then you will, in fact, need a separate release of source code.

BrunoBernardino 39 days ago |

It is ultimately a risk many are not willing to take. If you're a small business or a single individual you just can't chase offenders and have _everything_ to lose.

I looked into this a lot as my wife and I wanted to make Uruky [1] open source, but also a sustainable business.

What we decided on was that after you've been a paying customer for a year, we provide the source code licensed with BUSL into AGPLv3 after 2 years; it's a weighed risk that we can still "be killed" from, but I personally value open source too much, especially in relation to privacy-related software.

[1]: https://uruky.com (ad-free, private, and paid search engine)

networked 39 days ago |

This idea is being tested with licenses like https://fsl.software/. FSL forbids "competing use" and converts to either Apache 2.0 or MIT after two years (for each version, like a Git commit).