Edison Carter linked to an article by RMS earlier on that advocated for a position much like this. I'd rather see immediate disclosure though, because this would allow people to work on interoperability, which I think is important too, and, e.g. third parties could develop add-ons. Also I have some concerns about the practicality of delayed disclosure. If source disclosure is delayed, the company could go bankrupt in the meantime, or the source code could be lost (or perhaps just parts of it, that for some reason were developed separately), or there could be unforeseen legal issues that come up and prevent the company from being able to release the source. In general, I just feel that the only way to be sure that we will actually get the source is to have it disclosed at the time.

If this argument were valid, then exactly the same argument would apply to people who write books, or songs, or any kind of copyrightable works which people can make derivatives of, which is virtually any except software, and yet such works get written. Copyright law is effective enough at preventing copying that works get made. Hiding source just isn't necessary for this.

If you wrote a search engine, you could make a business model out of have people use it from a server. You wouldn't have to publish it, so you wouldn't need to disclose the source. If you decided to make a business model out of publishing it, Google, Microsoft, etc. wouldn't be able to use a derived work to compete with you, because they'd have to disclose their source to do that. Also, even by publishing it without releasing the source, Google, Microsoft, etc. would already be able to use it as a back-end without telling you, they wouldn't strictly need source for that.

If you don't release the source, what are you really contributing to progress anyway? Progress is made by 'standing on the shoulders of giants'--by taking what has gone before and improving on it. If you don't release the source, it is not possible to build upon it. Your work is just a dead end, so what real progress has been made?

Archiving documents for 5 years is a standard legal requirement, if a company goes bankrupt a buyer can be found. In any case, 80% tax is a strong incentive to release source after 5 years, which is an optimal time to disclose recent source, in fact it should help users with older hardware if their systems get renewed support after the original programmers have moved onto a new version with higher system requirements.



A better solution would be a subscription to an innovation company that releases source to the public domain upon enough funds raised, I could see a case for setting code to an app free if a target is met.



The model I have in mind would run off the user's hardware as a p2p network, so keeping the source hidden from competitors for a while is important as I'd like to use this decade's technology without it turning up in Bing unpaid for. (Lookup the google sting on bing with false search terms going through explorer getting results in bing.)


Well, I think a source bounty system would be an acceptable reward for contributing to the public domain. But I would require that any contributions to the source be made available to the original developer, so innovation can be spread evenly.

Making something a legal requirement doesn't always ensure it happens. (e.g, I'm given to understand that some assets in the current SFO investigation were improperly offered as security to more than one party.) If a company goes bankrupt, then buyers will not necessarily be interested in all assets, and there may be no remaining party for the incentive to apply to. I guess I'd perhaps feel more confident about this if, say, the CEO made a guarantee against their personal assets too. That way, regardless of what happened to the company, there'd be an individual with a strong incentive to ensure the source release did happen.

That's fine if I'm not forced into using something else because that's what other people are using. I bought a copy of CodeWeavers CrossOver for running MS WIndows programs on (understanding that they contribute back to the Wine project), but unfortunately it doesn't run everything I need to (although it's still very useful). I can't necessarily choose an open source option (although I try to if I can).

If the program is P2P by nature, then anyone else trying to distribute a derived version would be under the same obligations re disclosure as you. And Bing didn't need to copy Google's engine, they just copied the results, from what I remember (in fact, this isn't even illegal, AFAIK, the dubious aspect is that Microsoft didn't give any credit to Google). So Bing can already copy your results.

Any such disclosure law should, of course, apply equally to all.

I'd like to repost (slightly reworded) an earlier suggestion from here (linked).

A high tax (e.g. ~50%) be placed on profits from sales of copyrighted software for which source code is not made available.

The reasoning being that copyright is granted for the purpose of advancing the public good by promoting progress, and even if the copyright term were shortened, closed source software would still fail to promote progress like any other kind of work would (because derived works can not easily be made from it), so people who publish software without making the source available contribute significantly less to progress, and therefore deserve less reward from copyright.