[License-discuss] Views on React licensing?

[Ben Tilly]

Item 1 of the OSD says, "The license shall not restrict any party from
selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software
distribution containing programs from several different sources. The
license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale."

Red Hat's trademark license fails this provision as badly as you could want.

The issue is the same as the one that arose for Debian (whose free software
guidelines are the inspiration for the OSD) with regards to Mozilla
trademarks.  See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_software_rebranded_by_Debian for what
happened next.

On Tue, Dec 6, 2016 at 3:40 PM, Tzeng, Nigel H. <Nigel.Tzeng at jhuapl.edu>
wrote:

> So Larry and Ben, is RHEL is not open source because you cannot
> redistribute RHEL without a trademark license from RedHat?
>
> If an explicit patent grant is a requirement for open source should an
> explicit trademark grant also be required?  Does CPAL provide an implicit
> permission to use trademark given the attribution requirement?
>
> From: License-discuss <license-discuss-bounces at opensource.org> on behalf
> of Ben Tilly <btilly at gmail.com>
> Reply-To: License Discuss <license-discuss at opensource.org>
> Date: Tuesday, December 6, 2016 at 6:04 PM
> To: License Discuss <license-discuss at opensource.org>
> Cc: "henrik.ingo at avoinelama.fi" <henrik.ingo at avoinelama.fi>
> Subject: Re: [License-discuss] Views on React licensing?
>
> Looking at the open source definition, it should be able apply to any
> license of any kind.
>
> The argument is that the patent grant is not open source because the
> inability to continue using the software after suing Facebook for patent
> infringement is a "price".  However you are unable to use the software
> before receiving it, so you do not wind up worse off from having received
> it.  Therefore there is no real price to receiving it.
>
> After having received the program, there is clearly a price to violating
> the license.  But the same is true for any license.  For example look at
> the GPL v3.  If you distribute a GPL v3 program without appropriate
> copyright notices as required by clause 4, then your license can be
> terminated under clause 10, and you will lose the right to continue running
> the software as granted under clause 2.  This is an apparent "price" of the
> exact same form.
>
> Either this patent grant is open source, or no license can qualify.
>
> On Tue, Dec 6, 2016 at 1:00 PM, Tzeng, Nigel H. <Nigel.Tzeng at jhuapl.edu>
> wrote:
>
>> On 12/6/16, 3:33 PM, "henrik.ingo at gmail.com on behalf of Henrik Ingo"
>> <henrik.ingo at gmail.com on behalf of henrik.ingo at avoinelama.fi> wrote:
>>
>>
>> >The question isn't about patents or copyrights. The point is that taking
>> >an OSI approved license and making additions to it by adding a separate
>> >file with additional terms and conditions, results in a combination which
>> >as a whole is not OSI approved open source license. It is no different
>> >from taking the BSD license and making additions to it within the same
>> >file.
>>
>> In what way is the BSD copyright license impacted by an external patent
>> grant license?
>>
>> How is this different than combining a BSD copyright license and an
>> external trademark license agreement?
>>
>> IMHO it has everything to do with whether patents are in or out of scope
>> for OSI license approval for copyright licenses.
>>
>> >I categorize patent grants with wide reaching termination clauses as
>> >commons-friendly. Like I said, my only regret is that there aren¹t
>> >licenses being used that would be even more wide reaching than this one.
>>
>> That¹s fine as long as there are open source licenses with far more narrow
>> grants or no grants whatsoever like CC0.
>>
>> CC0->ECL v2->Apache->React should all be fine from a OSI license approval
>> perspective.
>>
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>
>
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