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

[Jim Wright]

I believe you may differ with me and many others on the scope of the BSD and MIT licenses.  (And, disagreement about the scope of implied licenses is part of the problem with relying on an implied license in the first place.) 

The license to the Software itself in the UPL is certainly as broad if not broader than any express or implied patent license in the BSD or MIT licenses, and the ability to expressly license larger works as well, granting additional permissions beyond even the license for the Software, broadens the license beyond how any patent lawyer I know construes either of them.  In short, this license is less restrictive, not more IMHO.

 Regards,
  Jim

On Apr 14, 2014, at 6:43 AM, Henrik Ingo <henrik.ingo at avoinelama.fi> wrote:

> On Sun, Apr 13, 2014 at 8:55 PM, Jim Wright <jim.wright at oracle.com> wrote:
>> 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.
>> 
> 
> Your own words here should have been a strong clue for you that this
> license fails basic assumptions of open source, like elaborated in
> more detail by Christopher. The whole point of open source is that you
> do share your code with (potentially) everything, and a recipient can
> use it for anything without asking for permissions from all original
> authors. (At least under the same license, sometimes even under a
> different license.)
> 
> Note also that everyone who commented failed to understand the clause
> about the LARGER_WORKS.txt. The reason seems clear now: what you're
> trying to articulate simply didn't make sense in an open source
> license.
> 
> You seem to argue in other responses that for copyright purposes this
> is still a valid open source license, it is just the patent grant that
> is limited to some specific scope. In that case however the
> justification for approving this license is undermined from a license
> proliferation point of view: This license doesn't add anything new
> when compared to existing permissive licenses.
> 
> Especially I should note that many people will argue that MIT and BSD
> licenses do include an implied patent license due to words such as
> "use" or "sell" (...while some argue the opposite, there isn't a
> consensus.) Hence your proposed license is not a better alternative,
> as you're *explicitly restricting* patent rights to a given scope, not
> really granting them.
> 
> In addition of course use of this license with an open source
> copyright license but restrictive patent grant would create a lot of
> confusion in the open source community and should therefore probably
> be recommended against.
> 
> henrik
> -- 
> henrik.ingo at avoinelama.fi
> +358-40-5697354        skype: henrik.ingo            irc: hingo
> www.openlife.cc
> 
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