Business Source License: report the 'change license'

[armijnhemel]

Short Description

The Business Source License has a so called "change license". It might be useful to report this, as it could be important information.

Of course, the business source license is a crappy license that should be avoided at all costs, but the code is being used.

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The business source license examples I have seen so far are very structured, so parsing it should not be too difficult, although there is variation (some use SDPX, others don't).

Example/Links if Any

Can you help with this Feature

[armijnhemel]

In some cases the license is somewhat reported, for example in the attached example from terraform:

      "detected_license_expression": "mpl-2.0 AND bsl-1.1",

The problem is that this is not entirely correct, as it is dependent on the change date: before the change date: bsl-1.1, after the change date: mpl-2.0. So that is something like a temporal or?

[armijnhemel]

Related: the change date is also important, because that's when the license changes:

Effective on the Change Date, or the fourth anniversary of the first publicly available distribution of a specific version of the Licensed Work under this License, whichever comes first, the Licensor hereby grants you rights under the terms of the Change License, and the rights granted in the paragraph above terminate.

Of course there are plenty of difficulties determining the right time: timezones are often not included (so perhaps "anywhere on earth" applies?) and I guess that change dates are sometimes also not updated to reflect the real status. Still it might be worthwhile to extract.

[armijnhemel]

Interesting find: the BUSL text from MariaDB has been changed to change the "fourth" anniversary bit to different values. I have seen "second", "fifth" and "tenth". I guess that these are strictly speaking not compliant with BUSL....

Example: https://github.com/econia-labs/econia/blob/main/LICENSE.md

[DennisClark]

Actually, I don't think that the "change date" in a BSL license triggers any automatic change to the license once the specified time span has been reached; it appears to me that it is only indicating a new license choice available to a specific release of the software. The value of software 2 years or more old with no maintenance applied to it remains mysterious to me. I don't think we need to do anything with this. Closing.

[armijnhemel]

The date isn't that important, but the change license very much is, because right now the conclusion that scancode gives ("mpl-2.0 AND bsl-1.1") is wrong, because due to the way the license works they aren't valid at the same time: it is either mpl-2.0 or bsl-1.1.

[mjherzog]

For BSL cases it seems that the bsl license would always be first in an OR expression