At a 10 year length of copyright.
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:
$ pacman -Qq | xargs pacman -Qi | grep -Po 'Licenses *: \K.*' | sed -E 's/ +/\n/g' | sed 's/-.*//' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | awk '$1 > 100'
242 MIT
277 LGPL
348 GPL
381 BSD
| 1 | MIT | 44.69% |
| 2 | Other | 15.68% |
| 3 | GPLv2 | 12.96% |
| 4 | Apache | 11.19% |
| 5 | GPLv3 | 8.88% |
| 6 | BSD 3-clause | 4.53% |
| 7 | Unlicense | 1.87% |
| 8 | BSD 2-clause | 1.70% |
| 9 | LGPLv3 | 1.30% |
| 10 | AGPLv3 | 1.05% |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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.