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

[Richard Fontana]

On Sun, 13 Apr 2014 10:55:24 -0700
Jim Wright <jim.wright at oracle.com> wrote:

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

I have to agree somewhat with Gerv in his followup comment on this. I
understand a sense in which 'modification of Apache' is less clean (I
explained this, I think, in my initial message on this license
submission), but I don't understand how Gerv's suggestion would result
in anyone distributing third-party GPL code. It's just a license
compatibility issue, an additional permission issue. 

What I think you're implying about the patent grant is that you consider
the patent grant in the Apache License 2.0 too narrow. From your
perspective, Oracle's perspective perhaps, and to put it really
bluntly, the Apache License 2.0 has (for your specific purposes) a flaw,
a flaw contained in its patent license grant (and patent termination),
the very provision of the Apache License that for years has been cited
by so many as its most salutary feature. You want a patent grant that is
broader than what's in Apache. If I'm right about this, this is
important to understand and independently assess, because it goes to the
question of whether the UPL is redundant with respect to the Apache
License.  

 - RF