[License-review] Submitting CC0 for OSI approval

[Richard Fontana]

On Sat, Feb 18, 2012 at 01:33:47PM -0500, John Cowan wrote:
> Richard Fontana <rfontana at redhat.com> writes:
> 
> > I am not sure whether there is precedent for an OSI-approved license
> > (at least, one that is, today, widely used) that explicitly reserves
> > all patent rights. Many licenses are silent on the issue, while
> > several relatively modern licenses include patent license grants of
> > certain sorts.
> 
> I went through all the OSI-approved licenses, and all but one either
> require contributors to license their patents (typically only as essential
> to the implementation) or make no mention of patents.  However, Clause
> 5 of the Frameworx license says:
> 
>         Except as expressly provided herein, this License Agreement
>         preserves and respects Your and The Frameworx Companys respective
>         intellectual property rights, including, in the case of The
>         Frameworx Company, its copyrights and patent rights relating to
>         the Frameworx Code Base.
> 
> Since this is the only mention of patents, this is in effect an express
> reservation of patent rights.  Obviously this is not a heavily used
> license, being in fact specific to one product of one licensor.  But it
> is OSI-approved.

Possibly not a good example, as I believe the Frameworx license is one
of that handful of irrational-exuberance-era OSI-approved licenses
that defy any rational attempt to successfully map their terms to the
Open Source Definition, or to prevailing community standards for what
is a free software/open source license. 

- RF