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Sunset License Rationale
Purpose
First and foremost, this distribution license will be a license with a sunset
provision, to limit the duration of time before bits of the work start to pass
into the public domain.
Secondly, it will be a simplified, informal copyleft license. The style being
sought after is similar to the Unlicense, and if the length is significantly
over that it's a bug.
Reasoning
The duration of copyright has been extended over and over again to the point
that it's de facto perpetual. Copyright law has been famously subverted with
the GPL to produce "copyleft" which has the purpose of keeping a work open
rather than closed. The idea is to do something similar to subvert the time
that a work remains under copyright protections.
If done right the result should be that anyone wanting to use parts of a work
under the rules of public domain will either have to use code many years out of
date, or the work itself has stagnated to the point where nobody cares anyway.
But the time that it takes for those parts of a work to be allowed under the
rules of public domain will remain reasonable, relatively short, and finite.
The length of 15 years was chosen after reviewing the timelines of multiple
major software projects, the policy of Pirate Party Australia, and a paper on
optimal copyright term lengths by Rufus Pollock published in August 2007.
Combining this idea with minimalistic copyleft clauses should fill another
hole in available licenses, as all current ones are exceedingly verbose.
The copyleft clauses have to be weak however, as otherwise works using this
license would not be able to be linked with LGPL/BSD/MIT licensed works, which
would be less than ideal. Both static and dynamic linking have to be allowed
as otherwise there would be too many language specific details required in the
license.
Scope
This is primarily conceived of as a software license. While the result may be
applicable to other works, it may not be optimal for them.
Software patents are not something that will be mentioned. The position taken
is that if software patents are a problem in your country, you should reform
the law.
Warranty disclaimers will also not be mentioned. The position taken is that
your software should do what you say it does, and that you should be
responsible for what you release to the public. Again, if this is a problem in
your country, you should reform the law.
(An interesting note about warranties is that, as buggy software is common, an
occasional software bug fits the standard of "passes ordinarily in the trade"
and thus would not violate a typical implied warranty of merchantability. You
are encouraged to check your local consumer law yourself to verify this.)
The focus is on the work actually released, not on spreading the license
itself.
Waiving anti-circumvention laws should be redundant and unnecessary, as the
license allows usage of the work for any purpose without restriction.
The license is not an EULA. Acceptance is not required to make use of the
licensed work.
No position is taken on the issues of tivoisation or software as a service, and
hence, neither issue will be mentioned.
License License
You may copy, distribute and use this rationale and accompanying license
document modified or verbatim for any purpose. If modified, the license name
must be changed.
You may copy, distribute and use the verbatim logo for any purpose associated
with the verbatim license or rationale. Be aware that the logo may not meet the
threshold of originality in some jurisdictions, but it is your responsibility
to check that.
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