This is a simple and experimental implementation of the clever Hive Commons License proposed by Hive Commons to create a variant between permissive and strict license types, in which anyone can derive work from a project with a HCL if they adopt the same license. However proprietary derivative works should announce a self-assessed valuation of their project, and accordingly pay a harberger taxation which could potentially benefit various beneficiaries. At any point, if someone decides so, they can pay the self-assessed price, and "free" the work.
Note: this project is not suitable at all for mainnet deployment, please refrain from doing so.
We go through a scenario in which an open source operating system adopts the HCL. Their source code can be found
at kernel.cool-os.eth.
The owner of Cool-OS deploys an instance of the HCL contract, with a pointer to the object (kernel.cool-os.eth),
and an address which refers to the license holder. They mention the address of this contract in their
LICENSE file, as a single source of truth.
If someone wants to derive from this work without releasing their source code, they deploy an instance
of the HCL contract, pointing to their object (kernel.macrosoft.eth) and after deployment,
send a transaction to the closeSource method, specifying their self-assessed price, and
sending some ether to be used for future tax collections.
To pay the tax, anyone can call the payTax method of a closed license, and it calculates the amount that
needs to be paid since the last tax collection, assuming an annual 7% ratio.
Anyone can now call the free method of the macrosoft license, sending enough ether to cover the price
in which case the license becomes open.
This simple model could be extended to allow for various license models and a linux-like permission system, which determines under what conditions someone can derive from this work, and under which conditions they must pay tax and announce a price. Other projects could in turn specify a list of license dependencies which would determine the possible license permissions for them.
Please feel free to create an issue or a PR for anything.