[License-discuss] Oracle Java Mission Control (JMC) became open-source May 2018, I have some license questions.

[Philippe Ombredanne]

Hi Michael,

On Fri, Jun 15, 2018 at 3:19 PM, Michael Wu <michael.wu at snowsoftware.com> wrote:
> I read in this article that JMC became open-source around May 2018.
> https://www.infoq.com/news/2018/06/open-source-jmc
> If I’m correct then JMC uses the open-source UPL license.
> https://opensource.org/licenses/UPL
> What does the open-source UPL license say about “for commercial use”
> situations?  I’m having trouble understanding the lawyer lingo.

The UPL is quite a permissive license that has only one main condition:

"The above copyright notice and either this complete permission
notice or at a minimum a reference to the UPL must be included
in all copies or substantial portions of the Software."

... which makes it quite compatible with most commercial usages IMHO.

What's interesting is that this is the first actual use of this
license I see in the wild.

Now JMC does disclose further licences beyond the UPL at:
http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jmc/jmc/file/ee529752f619/license/THIRDPARTYREADME.txt

... and this includes the combo of permissive and limited-copyleft licenses:
- BSD-3-Clause
- EPL-1.0
- CCDL-1.0
- Apache-2.0
and this other license:
- JSON

... which is the only problematic item to me: this is not a bona-fide
open source license because of this clause:
"The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil."

This is something both difficult to enforce and comply with and has
been widely debated in the past when it was introduced.

-- 
Cordially
Philippe Ombredanne

+1 650 799 0949 | pombredanne at nexB.com
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