[License-review] Request for Approval of Universal Permissive License (UPL)

[Jim Wright]

Much obliged for the look and responses inline below.

 Regards,
  Jim


On Apr 11, 2014, at 6:02 AM, Gervase Markham <gerv at mozilla.org> wrote:

> On 11/04/14 01:39, Jim Wright wrote:
>> Many commercial developers require the ability to use code licensed
>> from other parties in both commercial offerings and copyleft licensed
>> FOSS projects.  They also generally prefer inbound licenses to
>> include an express patent license.  This has resulted, among other
>> things, in the widespread use of contributor agreements containing
>> the desired patent license grants, as neither the BSD nor MIT
>> licenses contain an express patent license or address the concept of
>> contribution to a larger work, and the Apache license is not
>> compatible with the GPLv2.
> 
> Did you consider forking the Apache license with an additional
> GPL-2-relicensing permissions grant clause?
> 

Unfortunately this is much less clean - then you're distributing 3rd party GPL code, which has different implications for everyone involved, and also the patent grant does not cover the entire work you're contributing to if it's not licensed under the Apache license, which in the case of proprietary code it usually isn't.



>> The Universal Permissive License (UPL)
>> 
>> Copyright (c) <year> <copyright holders>
>> 
>> Subject to the condition set forth below, permission is hereby
>> granted, free of charge and under any and all patent and copyright
>> rights owned or freely licensable by each licensor hereunder, 
> 
> Does hereunder mean "written further down in this file", or "under this
> license"?
> 


Under this license.  (Apologies for legalese. :-)



>> whether
>> an original author or another licensor, to any person obtaining a
>> copy of this software, associated documentation and/or data
> 
> This part seems to tie the licensing of the software's associated
> documentation to the license of the software, without any option to e.g.
> Creative Commons the docs and UPL the code. Is that intended?


It certainly doesn't stop anyone from dual licensing the doc under some other license, CC or otherwise, which may not be a bad idea for some applications, but yes, you're correct, the licensor is granting all the same rights in the included documentation that they are in the code, as we want to make sure that anyone using this as a contribution agreement gets the full set of rights in the entire contribution and doesn't have to try to sort out different licenses to specs or other doc, data, etc. that are included with the Software.



> 
>> (collectively the "Software"), to deal in current and future versions
>> of both
>> (a) the Software, and (b) any piece of software and/or hardware
>> listed in the LARGER_WORKS.TXT file included with the Software (each
>> a “Larger Work” to which the Software is contributed by such
>> licensors),
> 
> Could you explain the rationale behind a specific list of larger works?
> The admin of such a list sounds like a pain.
> 

The idea here is that the original authors of the Software are not generally going to be contributing to everything, but more often just to one thing or a set of things defined at the beginning - as I mentioned in my response to Karl, my first intended application is the Java Community Process.  If the authors all agree, they can edit the file later, but they must all agree before they could do that just like they would need to agree to otherwise alter the license grant (e.g., by just editing the text of the license).  In general, I don't realistically see these files getting edited much, but rather set to a scope at the beginning of a project, for the purpose of allowing the contribution to something that was planned for in advance.  It's doable, but any time you want to change the scope of a license, if you have multiple contributors, this can be kind of a pain and the license does not solve that problem.



> Gerv
> 
> _______________________________________________
> License-review mailing list
> License-review at opensource.org
> http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-review