Discuss: UoI/NCSA Open Source License

[John Taylor McEntire]

Larry:

Thank you for your insightful comments.  Your acknowledgement that there
may be reasons to merge the BSD and MIT licenses, is greatly
appreciated.  Please note that our intent was that this license be
unrestricted as I believe was the intent in the MIT and BSD licenses.

When we embarked as an institution to determine how we should officially
license in the open source realm, as with most university functions, a
committee was formed.  From the deliberations of that committee came the
proposed license.  We intentionally tried not to stray from the
licensing language that had been used in the past therefore the use of
common wording.  What ambiguities may be in this license are leftovers.
Although your proposed wording and other suggested changes (i.e. the
name of the license) are interesting and possibly right on the mark for
the universal issues surrounding the open source community, I am
concerned because such would be somewhat difficult to handle within our
committee based environment.  I hope as you have suggested that approval
doesn't require such action.

Your aspirations in regards to derivatives and the use of patents are
very intriguing, but is something bigger than what we can tackle at this
point.  These are pertinent issues confronting the open source community
at present (and will even be more so in the future).  As a community we
really need to address these issues in a separate forum.  I imagine that
if the academic community got their heads together that there may also
possibly be federal funding available to help fund the workings of such
an activity as long as there was someone to spearhead it.  Needless to
say, such a worthwhile activity would take a considerable amount of time
and energy and most importantly must be done as a collective effort.
Hopefully others will also see the need - creating a groundswell to move
such forward.  

As to our request for our particular needs at this time, I hope the
proposed license can be approved as is.

Best regards,

John
    

-----Original Message-----
From: Lawrence E. Rosen [mailto:lrosen at rosenlaw.com] 
Sent: Monday, March 18, 2002 5:52 PM
To: John Taylor McEntire
Cc: license-discuss at opensource.org
Subject: RE: Discuss: UoI/NCSA Open Source License

John,

I really appreciate the clear focus you presented in your rationale for
your UoI/NCSA Open Source License.  There are good reasons to merge the
BSD and MIT licenses into a clearer, but still short, open source
license -- and you stated those reasons well.  I believe your license is
qualified for approval as an open source license.  I do have some
questions, however, and a suggestion, that I hope you can address first.

There are some ambiguities in the first sentence of your license,
essentially the grant of license statement.  Why do you use the phrase
"to deal with the Software without restriction" when the rights listed
in the remaineder of the sentence are so explicit?  You also say
"including without limitation" as if there are other rights you might
have included if you wanted to, but you don't want to name them.  Are
there any unlisted rights (e.g., the right to perform) that you intend
to withhold?  Do you intend the grant to be unrestricted or restricted
in some way related to the meaning of the phrase "deal with?"  

Would it be sufficient to say:

   Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person
   obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation
   (the "Software"), to use, copy, modify, merge, publish,
   distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software,
   and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so,
   subject to the following conditions:

I assume the licensor is also granting patent rights necessary to
practice the Software.  Does this in some way include patent rights to
practice those patent claims in derivative works?

To be clearer about that point, perhaps you should say something like:

   Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person
   obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation
   (the "Software"), (1) to use, copy, modify, merge, publish,
   distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software,
   and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, 
   and (2) under patent claims owned or controlled by the licensor
   essential to the use of the Software as furnished by that
   licensor, to make, use or sell the Software, 
   subject to the following conditions:

You style your license as a template (THANKS!) but the name of the
license belies that.  Your license is so simple that I'll bet OSI
receives many requests in coming months to use this license under a
different name.  Thus licenses proliferate and confuse....  Perhaps many
colleges and universities will want to adopt your license.  Can we agree
on a more global name for this license and perhaps get your help
coordinating review and adoption of this "standard" license, based upon
the MIT and BSD licenses and in their spirit, by other relevant
institutions?

I don't mean to muck up what would otherwise be a fairly straightforward
approval process.  But since you said you want to address certain
deficiencies in the MIT and BSD licenses, I can at least ask your
thoughts on these broader issues.

/Larry Rosen

> -----Original Message-----
> From: John Taylor McEntire [mailto:jmcentir at ad.uiuc.edu] 
> Sent: Thursday, March 14, 2002 1:27 PM
> To: license-discuss at opensource.org
> Cc: jmcentir at uiuc.edu
> Subject: Discuss: UoI/NCSA Open Source License

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