That after 10 years, what was licensed as open becomes even more open? I think only a minority of licensors and licensees would have a problem with that.
I think the GPL is a good license, both v2 and v3, for the restrictions they place to promote more FOSS and ensure software users the rights I would hope everyone believes they ought to have (e.g. the 4 freedoms to the software of devices they own via the anti-tivoization clauses).
Having said that, do most licensors use the GPL as opposed to licenses like BSD/MIT? And of those that use the GPL, do they do it for the restrictions it has as opposed to just following a collective habit?
Looking at what I have installed on the computer I'm on, GPL is hanging in there. I see:
The broader point being that every one of those licenses is just that -- a license. The terms of the license apply because the material is copyrighted.
And it's one place where you can directly specify your intent. In your license, say that everything reverts to the public domain in 5 years or 10 years. Grep away and show me how many licenses do that.
Varying durations for different types of media should be discussed as part of copyright reform. But simple statements like "10 years" reveal that people haven't thought things through.
Or maybe they have thought things through and they just don’t agree with your conclusion.
For people who choose a non-viral license, why not go straight to public domain? I see three reasons: 1. it avoids confusion and difficulty with countries that don’t recognize public domain. 2. it provides an explicit disclaimer of liability. 3. people like the requirement to credit the author or distributing organization.
1 wouldn’t be a problem with short copyright terms. 2 shouldn’t be either. I doubt someone would get anywhere trying to sue for damages caused by a defect in copyright-expired code. You’d lose 3 after 10 years but I’d guess open source authors see that as a nice-to-have rather than a hard requirement. The credit in proprietary software using non-viral open source is almost always buried in some “licenses” file nobody ever looks at anyway.
> In your license, say that everything reverts to the public domain in 5 years or 10 years. Grep away and show me how many licenses do that.
Look, I'm no lawyer, but my broader point is that something like that might not make much if any difference to most. It doesn't seem to me that there's much difference between the MIT license and public domain. The MIT just requires attribution and propagation of the license text.
If you add up the MIT licensed projects with others that have similar licenses, you might get to a 51%, at least according to the GitHub stats. I would think most of these people just picked a license by what other people picked. They don't really, really care to put the particular restrictions they did.
I'm not saying that 10 years is a good number, or that licenses are bad. I'm just saying that your pick of FOSS might be a poor example to argue about the need for long copyright terms.
The only ones among the FOSS community that likely care to have long copyright terms are those that pick GPL-type licenses, which have more substantial restrictions to ensure the freedoms of end-users.
Linux, Blender, and WordPress immediately spring to mind as software that would be in a very different place if their codebases reverted to public domain at the 10th year of their existence.
The Linux kernel has changed a lot in the last 10 years. Having all the code in it that's >= 10yo become public domain would only mean you'd be able to run an ancient kernel on old hardware without worrying about the GPL license terms.
How many are still running kermels from 10 years ago. even for mainline stuff with insignificant changes such that it is out of copyright (an interesting legal question itself), there is enough that is significant in new kernels
It's not about running a 10 year old Kernel, it's about a trillion dollar corporation owning a source snapshot, throwing 5,000 engineers at it, and not contributing anything back.
It also effectively turns GPL3 to GPL2 on a rolling 10 year basis.
People freaked about Tivo 20 years ago. Now imagine what kind of chaos Nvidia and Oracle could cause starting from even Ubuntu 14 or a 3.18 Kernel.
I'm surprised at people falling back into the BSD, MIT and GPL banter from 15 years ago.
Stop promoting your faves, stop generalizing about the motivations behind your non-faves, and to paraphrase John Lennon: imagine no licensing.
Now think a little deeper how that would change the motivations of developers, massive corporations, and VCs. Especially those that have given little but lip service to the whole movement.
There is a fairly major difference between a copyright of 100+ years, 10 years and 0 years. Right now we have 100+ years and thus we need GPL as a counter force.
If it was 10 years than we would likely still need GPL. The industry would likely change a bit towards more hostile design, so gpl would likely change to address those.
A world without copyright would also change things significantly. I would suspect more companies would turn to services in order to create restrictive TOS, which would create incentivizes for counter pushes with licenses like AGPL. We can already see this with AI and data scraping where traditional copyright currently do not exist. In the absent of copyright, companies are creating TOS that restrict the use of scraping for AI learning. Time will tell if such "licenses" will be enforceable, but in theory people are simply replacing copyright law with anti-hacking laws.
At the end there will likely always be a GPL-like concept as long there are legal frameworks that is used to restrict how creative works and tools are consumed, used and extended.
In the very early history of computing, it was still belived that copyright did not apply to computer programs. What large companies, like IBM, did was to require all customers to first sign a contract where the customer was forbidden, among many other things, to spread or copy the software.
Because copyright doesn't expire on human timescales and it's legal to use cryptographic methods to prevent compatible hardware/software, so things wouldn't be on an even playing field.
If you had to submit source code to the copyright office to be granted a copyright, and it expired after ~10 years (at which point the source is published), and anticompetitive, anticonsumer hardware locking methods were illegal, you'd be looking at a reasonable trade again, and copyleft would be essentially redundant.
To make 10 year copyright work with software, we would probably need to force companies to release the source code when the copyright expires. That way we keep an even playing field. Otherwise I think everything related to open source code would work out fine.
That effectively gives the copyright holder an exclusive ten year head start on a derivative work, because only they have the source to build on. It has to be open from day one for anything to work. And if you blow away copyright and therefore GPL, obviously the incentives change dramatically.
I'm not really worried about someone building on GPL in secret while waiting for the license to expire. They're still stuck ten years behind mainline. It's a pretty even playing field, and I don't think any side gets blown out.
If proprietary code had to be released read-only a year or two in advance of becoming public domain you'd have basically the same effect, but I would not expect the effect to be very big.
