Ask HN: Delayed open source licensing / “eventually open” examples?

10 pointsby schoen3 jaar geleden5 comments

Hi! I'm working on a project with the Open Source Initiative and Open Tech Strategies which is collecting historical examples of "delayed open source licensing". This refers to licensing of software projects that were not initially free/open source when released, but became so on a (pre-planned and pre-announced) delay.

For instance, a software developer might initially publish a project as proprietary or "open core" but announce that improvements will be relicensed Apache or GPL with a 1 or 2-year delay.

There are dozens of projects that have pursued versions of this licensing strategy and several different license texts used to implement it (such as the Transitive Grace Period Public License/Bootstrap Open Source License, and the Business Source License). Can you help us identify more?

You can see ones that we know about already at

https://code.librehq.com/ots/dosp-research/-/blob/main/notes.md

You can post examples (projects or licenses) here, or e-mail to dosp-research at the Open Source Initiative's domain name.

You can also see Karl Fogel's request at

https://kfogel.org/notice/AZSlnFS0GBe2x7Rd6u

Note: We're not looking for examples of initially-proprietary projects that were permanently relicensed as a result of a one-time decision that wasn't planned or announced ahead of time. For example, Netscape Navigator -> Firefox doesn't count because Netscape didn't originally have a plan to make it open source.

By default, we'll publicly credit you for your suggestion when we eventually publish a whitepaper collecting these examples.

Thanks!

6 comments

Daeraxa3 jaar geleden

Zed is currently doing this, still pre-open source: https://zed.dev/blog/open-sourcing-zed-on-zed

Same with Ghostty: https://mitchellh.com/ghostty

Atom had a delayed open sourcing but I don't know if this was planned, they had already open sourced some parts of it but not the whole editor: https://atom-editor.cc/blog/2014/05/06/atom-is-now-open-sour...

jjgreen3 jaar geleden

North Road's SLYR (ESRI to QGIS Compatibility Suite) does that (and rather good code it is too).

https://north-road.com/slyr/

edit: I see North Road is actually on your list, but eventual openness not obvious. I think that's clear for SLYR at least.

wmf3 jaar geleden

I'm not getting my hopes up but I'm glad to see OSI looking into this because IMO BUSL is actually better and more honest than AGPL but one is OSI-approved and the other is not.

mdwalters3 jaar geleden

2 months ago (August 2023), on a "What are you working on" thread, I stated that I was making a extensible text editor on the web. I said on the comment that my laptop was undergoing repairs, and it would be open-sourced by the end of August. The repair took much longer than expected, and had to push the deadline to the end of October 2023, as a result of me forgetting about the project.

kfogel3 jaar geleden

Just following up to say thank you, @Daeraxa and @jjgreen, for the examples.

@mdwalters, good luck with the text editor, and @wmf we may not personally agree on the AGPL but we do agree on the usefulness of the OSI doing this research!

unlockaiprompts3 jaar geleden