tegwick
f37f79192d
Persists the five prior-art/legal research artifacts and the original draft skeleton as dated history/ records (260729- prefix, git mv to preserve history), consistent with this repo's convention that history/ holds dated non-normative artifacts rather than living working documents: - history/260729-TRSL-PriorArt-Survey.md - history/260729-TRSL-Terminology-Guardrails.md - history/260729-TRSL-FutureLicense-PatentPrecedent.md - history/260729-TRSL-ContributorRights-Research.md - history/260729-TRSL-Jurisdiction-StandardTerms.md - history/260729-TargetRevenueSourceLicense-Draft.md (superseded) Adds specs/TargetRevenueSourceLicense-V1C1.md: the first candidate written as actual operative license text (11 sections: definitions, noncommercial grant, commercial-use restriction, patent license, automatic conversion, successive phases, termination/cure, warranty/liability, trademarks, general provisions) rather than a bracket-annotated skeleton. Carries a prominent preliminary-status notice near the top and a non-normative Appendix A tracking the nine items still needing legal resolution before any candidate can become official Version 1.0. Updates all cross-references (README, PRD, TSD, SCOPE, workplan) to the new paths; the workplan's T06 human-accept gate now points at V1C1. Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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TRSL Terminology Guardrails: OSI Open Source Definition vs. Fair Source
Document status: Research artifact, Stage 0 (workplans/TREV-WP-0001-license-prior-art-research.md T02)
Not legal advice.
1. Why pre-conversion TRSL cannot be called "Open Source"
The Open Source Definition (OSD), maintained by the Open Source Initiative, states two relevant clauses verbatim (fetched from opensource.org/osd, 2026-07-29):
Clause 5 — No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups: "The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons."
Clause 6 — No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor: "The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research."
TRSL's pre-conversion state requires a commercial entitlement for commercial use (specs/TargetRevenueLicenseConcept.md §21.1). That is precisely a field-of-endeavor restriction — "may not be used commercially without payment" restricts a specific field of endeavor (business use) exactly as Clause 6's own example describes. There is no ambiguity here: pre-conversion TRSL cannot be described as Open Source under the OSD, full stop, regardless of how the restriction is priced, credited, or eventually lifted.
This is not a defect to work around — it is a category TRSL should state plainly and repeatedly, because the alternative (softening the language to sound more "open" than it is) is exactly the kind of ambiguity that creates legal and reputational risk later.
2. How Fair Source's framing applies
Fair Source's own definition (fetched from fair.io/about, 2026-07-29) requires three things of software claiming the label:
"(1) is publicly available to read; (2) allows use, modification, and redistribution with minimal restrictions to protect the producer's business model; and (3) undergoes delayed Open Source publication (DOSP)."
TRSL's pre-conversion Phase satisfies all three:
- Source-available (public source, readable).
- Modification/redistribution permitted subject to the commercial-use restriction (a "minimal restriction to protect the producer's business model" in Fair Source's own words).
- TRSL's Conversion Event is a DOSP mechanism — a mandatory, eventual transition to an OSI-approved license (MIT/Apache-2.0).
Fair Source is explicitly a category label and definition, not a specific enforceable license text — it does not itself specify a trigger mechanism. TRSL's revenue/Target-based trigger is therefore a novel instance within the Fair Source category, not something Fair Source's own material provides precedent for at the mechanism level (see history/260729-TRSL-PriorArt-Survey.md §3.2 for the closer per-version time-trigger precedent from FSL).
3. Recommended terminology guardrail (confirms and slightly sharpens README's existing table)
| State | Accurate label | Must never be called |
|---|---|---|
| Pre-conversion, noncommercial use | Source-available (Fair Source category; permitted uses per Phase terms) | "Open Source," "free software," "OSS" |
| Pre-conversion, commercial use | Commercially licensed / entitlement required | "Open Source with a paid tier," "open core" (open core implies a separate proprietary add-on to an already-open core, which is a different structure — TRSL restricts the core itself, temporarily) |
| Post-conversion | Open source under the declared Future License (MIT or Apache-2.0), and may then be described as OSI-approved Open Source without qualification | — |
This matches and confirms the guardrail table already published in README.md — this research did not surface a reason to change it (working default Q1/Q2 stand as published).
4. Recommendation for Q1/Q2 (working defaults)
No change recommended to specs/OpenQuestions-WorkingDefaults.md Q1 (noncommercial rights, blocked on legal for exact clause text) or Q2 (definition of commercial use, blocked on legal for edge cases). This research confirms the category framing (source-available vs. Fair Source vs. Open Source) is correct and stable; it does not resolve the still-open edge cases in Q2 (affiliates, contractors, mixed-purpose, public-sector use), which remain genuinely open and are better addressed by T05's jurisdiction research plus specialist review, not by this terminology-framing task.
5. For T06 (draft skeleton)
Use this document's §3 table as the authoritative terminology reference when drafting the TRSL preamble/recitals. Any occurrence of the word "open" in marketing or documentation copy describing a not-yet-converted Phase should be flagged as a defect, per this guardrail.