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

[Gervase Markham]

Hi Jim,

On 15/04/14 10:50, Jim Wright wrote:
> They're separate objections actually.  The patent license in the
> Apache license is materially narrower than the license here, so yes,
> that *is* an objection to straight Apache - in a case where you're
> contributing to a work under proprietary terms, the patent license
> only covers the contribution under the ASL and not the broader work.

Maybe I've not quite understood this.

Are you saying that if I contribute a one-line patch to a piece of UPL
code, and that UPL code is used in the Java SDK and lists "Java SDK" in
its LARGER_WORKS.TXT file, I have just freely licensed any patent I or
my company owns that covers anything in the Java SDK?

That seems... broad.

> But there's also the issue of introducing 3rd party GPL code to
> products that may not have any - if I take a contribution under UPL,
> and someone violates the GPL on OpenJDK but not the UPL, I can freely
> work with that party to fix the situation.  If there's third party
> GPL code in there, once I've accused them of a GPL violation, some
> would certainly argue that I can't fully restore their GPL license
> because the termination for breach of the GPL applies to that third
> party GPL code as well and separately, and if I'm not the copyright
> holder in that code and cannot sublicense it because of the way the
> GPL works, their license cannot be fully restored without separately
> interacting with the copyright holder in that other code.

Sorry if I'm being dense, but I can't make head or tail of that :-((
What has 3rd party GPLed code going into (or not going into) OpenJDK got
to do with deciding whether the UPL is equivalent to, better than or
worse than Apache+GPLv2-only-clause?

> Unfortunately I think this problem is not easily solvable and I
> didn't want to boil the ocean here.  The same issue crops up if you
> have an MIT license to some code and mix and match it with Apache
> code - you can end up with different licenses to different pieces of
> the same component, some subject to an express patent license with
> particular terms and some not.  I can't fix *everything* here.  :-)

Sure. But I'm not sure it's at all clear from the license how the
LARGER_WORKS.TXT file is managed and added to, and how you explain which
parts of the code different entries in the file apply to. Guidance on
that point, with examples, may help.

Gerv