[License-discuss] Pre-submission discussion: Zero-Clause BSD with Patent Grant (0BSD-P)

[Михаил Чернов]

Rob, Josh,

Thank you for the detailed feedback. I have thought about your points
carefully, and I agree with them.

Rob, your explanation about the chain-of-custody problem is correct. A
patent grant without attribution cannot be tracked, and the "shall not
apply to any other combinations" language from BSD-2-Clause-Patent does not
work in a license that explicitly permits unattributed copying. I see now
that this makes the grant effectively void upon modification, which defeats
its purpose.

Josh, your question about the specific use case is also fair. I could not
describe a real project that needs this combination, and I understand why
this looks like license proliferation.

I am withdrawing the 0BSD-P draft. I will not submit it to OSI.

I am now exploring a different problem: the loss of attribution in AI
supply chains. I will post a separate pre-submission discussion for that
shortly.

Thank you again for taking the time to respond.

--
Mikhail Chernov

ср, 14 окт. 2026 г. в 23:53, Josh Berkus <josh at berkus.org>:

>
> >> I am considering submitting the Zero-Clause BSD with Patent Grant
> >> (0BSD-P)
> >> to OSI for approval. Before doing so, I would like to get feedback
> >> from the
> >> community.
>
> Aside from Rob's objections, all of which I agree with, you would also
> need to obtain permission from a BSD foundation to call this license
> "0BSD" anything, or you'd have to change the name.  Rob did get that
> permission.
>
> That aside: why are you doing this?  It's not the goal of the OSI to
> have licenses for every possible combination of conditions; if they
> wanted that, the OSI could just build its own license-generating LLM and
> be done with it.  So, do you have a specific use for a license with
> patent grants and no attribution?  Can  you describe that use?
>
> --
> Josh Berkus
>
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