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Comment by bobajeff | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if there is a license that you can use that had a built-in expiration date. Like a auto-public-domain code release clause.

Some way that if you start using a product you have a legal guarantee that you won't be dependent on that company's service indefinitely.

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A built-in expiration date, like a sane copyright law. The original law was 14 years before disney got a hold of it.

According to Wikipedia though, that copyright extension was to harmonize with the EU copyright terms. The EU member states increased the copyright terms first and companies in the US also wanted the same terms in the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act

The Business Source License does that. I'm not able to find a site for the project but Sentry's got a blog post about it: https://blog.sentry.io/2019/11/06/relicensing-sentry

Yes this is possible. Founded a company selling to governments and we put this in every contract. It help assuage their concerns in case we went out of business.

Sounds somewhat like the Transitive Grace Period Public License, where derivative works must be open sourced a year after deployment

In the United States, authors cannot put their creative works into the public domain. There is noting in the statute or case law that allows this. Furthermore, authors (except work-for-hires) and their heirs, have the right to terminate copyright transfers and licenses after 35 years.

No, but you can license the work on terms roughly equivalent to what is allowed under public domains via something like https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc...

I don't think you need a special license. The owner(s) of the code just need to issue a statement that the code will be available under <license> as of <date>, similar to what Dan Bernstein did with qmail.

If you are a company dependent on a startup you can often get the source code in escrow if the startup would to fold or be acquired. I have had this work out multiple times in the past.

Yeah what if it were similar to patents, they have a standard shelf-life of protection.

With software I feel like a much shorter timespan would be better as systems become obsolete much faster.

How would you enforce it? Patents require a patent so it’s easy for that to slip into public domain but source code is a living beast that’s al2ays changing are the patent offices supposed to keep an up to date repo of all projects?

Seems like it would be easy to circumvent by altering your system clock. But I like the idea! I guess you could deal with that by hosting an activation server or something like that where you can guarantee the time is accurate.

I think op is talking about licenses, not drm.

oh, whoops

I mean it's perfectly possible to have a license that legally expires at a certain time. Most businesses, in an effort to avoid fine liabilities, will follow the legal terms. Periodic online activation definitely helps increase compliance rate, but in terms of true, total compliance enforcement, it's a DRM situation, it's not possible.

A license is a legal agreement, and good luck arguing in court that you live in a different time than everyone else. You’re talking about the mechanics of how a license key would work, which is really not what is being discussed.

You'd have to change the system clock of your legal system.

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