Update LICENSE.md

[erlend-sh]

I’m not perfectly clear on how this form is supposed to be automated, as alluded to here:

https://writing.kemitchell.com/2023/12/01/PolyForm-Countdown

This form makes delayed relicensing, as under MariaDB’s Business Source License, easy to implement clearly with any choice of initial license. A project could put any restricted or share-alike it likes in its LICENSE file, then append PolyForm Countdown to LICENSE in release tarballs to schedule a change to more permissive terms.

Would we make a github action out of this?

[erlend-sh]

We wanna be listed as a Fair Source company, which is currently blocked on this PR.

It’s more important that we have a merged v0.1 of it, even if the automated part hasn’t been figured out yet.

Related:

• Add Polyform NC license + Countdown addendum fairsource/fair.io#31

[zicklag]

Gotcha, I'll make this the next thing I look at.

[zicklag]

So the part that's confusing me is the part about the countdown license saying "Each contributor licenses this release to you on the new license terms below", which we can't really claim if we are automatically re-licensing the work with a different countdown timer on each release.

The Each contributor is the suspicious term I guess. Can we just change it to The Copyright holders or something maybe?

[erlend-sh]

I’ve reached out to @kemitchell for clarification.

[erlend-sh]

So the part that's confusing me is the part about the countdown license saying "Each contributor licenses this release to you on the new license terms below", which we can't really claim if we are automatically re-licensing the work with a different countdown timer on each release.

I added a clarification to our CLC explainer that might alleviate your concerns:

Furthermore, as a consequence of our Polyform Countdowm License Grant, all code releases older than two years are solely licensed as Blue Oak Model License v1.0, i.e. no longer dual-licensed.

The countdown license doesn’t re-license anything. Rather, it removes the NonCommercial licensing from all contributors’ works, leaving just the Blue Oak license.

The ‘new license terms’ = one less license.

[zicklag]

OK, just one thought about the dual licensing.

[zicklag]

The dual-licensing is a little confusing, because normally, in the Rust world, when something is dual licensed, it is dual licensed at your option between the two licenses.

In this case, we are dual licensing, but not giving you an option, because if we gave you an option you could just choose Blue Oak and use it for commercial purposes.

Maybe we add something like:

Suggested change

	> **Note:** While the code is dual licensed, it is dual licensed under both licenses **without** an option between them, aka `Polyform-NonCommercial and Blue-Oak-1.0`. This is in contrast to other dual licenses such as `MIT or Apache-2.0`, which allows an option between the two licenses.

[erlend-sh]

The dual-licensing works the same way for us. The difference is that we are only dual-licensing individual PRs from contributors outside of the Weird team. We are not dual-licensing our codebase as a whole.

If someone wanted to reuse the code of a Weird contributor’s PR, they could indeed use that code under the terms of Blue Oak.

Licensing easily gets confusing, especially when going off the beaten path as we are. But I’d rather keep our legalese as brief as possible and address the confusion as it arises, rather than trying to preempt it with even more words.

[zicklag]

The difference is that we are only dual-licensing individual PRs from contributors outside of the Weird team. We are not dual-licensing our codebase as a whole.

Oohh... That makes sense. I had missed that, even though that is indeed what it says.

OK, I'm good. :) 👍️

[zicklag]

The difference is that we are only dual-licensing individual PRs from contributors outside of the Weird team. We are not dual-licensing our codebase as a whole.

Oohh... That makes sense. I had missed that, even though that is indeed what it says.

OK, I'm good. :) 👍️