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

[Richard Fontana]

On Sun, 13 Apr 2014 10:41:11 -0700
Jim Wright <jim.wright at oracle.com> wrote:

> The intent here is to allow the authors to grant a license, including
> patent rights, in a particular, listed larger work to which they're
> contributing.  I wrote it with various uses in mind, but the most
> immediate use case is in the Java Community Process for the
> development of JSR reference implementations in other forges like
> Eclipse.  Folks have been complaining for a long time that everyone
> needed to sign an assignment to contribute, which won't work on other
> forges (who don't want to require or inquire about Oracle assignment
> agreements), and this way people will be able to contribute without
> that.  
> 
> I also see a lot of other people's contribution agreements in my role
> at Oracle (I have to approve all of them), and am hoping that a
> standard form could help harmonize practices in this area. 

This is key for the OSI and license-review community to understand,
and (based on the comments already made) what I'm not sure is going to
be well understood unless it is spelled out really clearly here. 

Jim is asking OSI to approve, as an Open Source license, something that
Oracle intends primarily to serve as a CLA, or rather a
CLA/copyright-assignment substitute. Unlike typical CLAs, the UPL is
written in a way that makes it entirely possible to use as a normal,
outbound open source license. But that is AFAICT not how Oracle intends
to use it and for all we know it may never be used in that way by
anyone. 

So think of this as somewhat like the ASF submitting the Apache ICLA for
approval as an Open Source License. Or Project Harmony submitting its
contributor agreement suite for approval as an Open Source license. The
only real difference is that there's a *chance* that the UPL might see
some uptake as a *normal* open source license -- a chance that, say,
the Ruby community or the JavaScript or Python communities might start
using the UPL in place of their current tendency to use the MIT
license (the license this resembles most closely). 

I would rate the chances of that happening as very low. I assume Oracle
is not going to try to evangelize use of the UPL as an open source
project license and even if it did it would be about as successful as,
I dunno, Red Hat trying to evangelize some new open source license I
might draft, which is to say probably not at all. :) The likelihood of
open source communities or individual developers discovering this
license on the OSI website (were it approved) and deciding to use it
because they like the idea of an MIT-like minimalist permissive license
that treats patents explicitly seems very low. 

None of that necessarily goes to the merits of the UPL or whether it
should be approved by the OSI. But it's important to understand the
unusual and unprecedented nature of this submission: Oracle wants the
OSI to approve a license that it primarily intends to serve as a CLA for
codebases that will *not* use this license on the outbound side. Jim
has been very transparent about that -- he specifically noted the use
case of commercial developers of copyleft and commercial (proprietary)
software.

This is, I believe, the first time that the OSI has ever been asked to
approve a new license that is primarily intended by its license
steward to serve as a CLA (loosely defined), an inbound contributor
license, not as an outbound open source project license. In all past
license submissions, to my knowledge, the license was contemplated as an
*outbound* license. That is what is (nonsubstantively) new here.

(Jim if you think I am wrong about any of the foregoing, please
comment. :)

 - RF