open source license with 24 month proprietary clause

[Terry Lambert]

Brett Glass wrote:
> At 09:16 PM 5/3/2003, Jeremy C. Reed wrote:
> >Has anyone heard of an open source license where new code based on it can
> >be kept proprietary for 24 months?
> 
> Jeremy, you're misusing the word "proprietary" in the same way that
> Stallman does. Also, what if market conditions make it impossible
> to recoup one's investment in 24 months,

That's easy to answer: get a patent, and you have another
18 years on top of that.  8-|.

Frankly, if you can't recoup your R&D investment in 24 months,
I have to not only wonder how you got funding to make that
investment in the first place, I have to wonder at the value
you are expecting to realize in the first place.


> or you decided to sell your business a year later?  It could
> turn into a "time bomb license."

It *is* a "time bomb license".  So are patents, so is copyright;
if you are legitimately arguing about anything here, it's the
length of the fuse.


> If you want to give something away, give it away. If you cannot afford
> to give something you own away, there's no shame in keeping it. Simple
> as that.

That's true.  But it's pretty clear the original poster *does*
want to give it away, after an amortization period.

FWIW: any time you buy software, or even a laptop, the IRS says
it depreciates to a value of $0 in as little as 3 years (that's
the period of time over which you are permitted to depreciate
such things).  So if you spend 10 years writing something, and
then want to amortize R&D costs over a standard depreciation
schedule for "like artifacts", well, you've wasted 7 years.

-- Terry