<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"> <html><head> <meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"> </head>Chris - thanks for your continued dialog on this. I especially appreciate your efforts to contain the license proliferation problem, and wish others were as sensitive to the problem as you.<br/><br/>Russ has been trying to address the proliferation problem by defining license templates. Perhaps the bsd license is an ideal place to prototype that idea, and webm is the ideal test to validate such an approach. I'm all for a better set of licensing policies that recognize the changing nature of copyright and patent laws and interpretation without forcing the osi to maintain a tower of legal babel.<br/><br/>M<br/><p>Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T</p><hr/><div><b>From: </b> Chris DiBona <cdibona@gmail.com>
</div><div><b>Date: </b>Fri, 4 Jun 2010 15:07:26 -0400</div><div><b>To: </b>License Discuss<license-discuss@opensource.org></div><div><b>Subject: </b>WebM license resolution.</div><div><br/></div>From the blog:<br><br><a href="http://webmproject.blogspot.com/2010/06/changes-to-webm-open-source-license.html">http://webmproject.blogspot.com/2010/06/changes-to-webm-open-source-license.html</a><br><br>You'll see on the <a href="http://webmproject.org/license/">WebM license
page</a> and in <a href="http://webmproject.org/code">our source code
repositories</a> that we've made a small change to our open source
license. There were a couple of issues that popped up after we released
WebM at Google I/O a couple weeks ago, specifically around how the
patent clause was written. <br><br>As it was originally written, if a
patent action was brought against Google, the patent license terminated.
This provision itself is not unusual in an OSS license, and similar
provisions exist in the 2nd Apache License and in version 3 of the GPL.
The twist was that ours terminated "any" rights and not just rights to
the patents, which made our license GPLv3 and GPLv2 incompatible. Also,
in doing this, we effectively created a potentially new open source
copyright license, something we are loath to do.<br><br>Using patent
language borrowed from both the Apache and GPLv3 patent clauses, in
this new iteration of the the patent clause we've decoupled patents from
copyright, thus preserving the pure BSD nature of the copyright
license. This means we are no longer creating a new open source
copyright license, and the patent grant can exist on its own.
Additionally, we have updated the patent grant language to make it
clearer that the grant includes the right to modify the code and give it
to others. (We've updated the <a href="http://www.webmproject.org/about/faq/#licensing">licensing FAQ</a>
to reflect these changes as well.)<br><br>We've also added a definition
for the "this implementation" language, to make that more clear. <br><br>Thanks
for your patience as we worked through this, and we hope you like,
enjoy (and most importantly) use WebM and join with us in creating more
freedom online. We had a lot of help on these changes, so thanks to our
friends in open source and free software who traded many emails, often
at odd hours, with us. <br><br>Not from the blog:<br><br>I didn't want to list the people who helped on the blog, as I didn't want to imply endorsement. but if they pipe up, I'll say thanks by name :-)<br><br>
Chris<br>
</html>