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

[Jim Wright]

No, it's certainly not unbounded unless I merge all of my products into the designated larger work, which I think you can guess Oracle is not very likely to do (speaking as one example), and neither are most other prospective folks who might use this as a contributor license.  But future versions of the same work, those are definitely covered, intentionally, and this is clear by stating that future versions of both the Software and the Larger Work are licensed.   Each prospective licensor will have to make their own decision about whether they want to license their patents for future versions in the communities in which they want to participate.

 Best,
  Jim


On Apr 15, 2014, at 9:15 AM, Richard Fontana <fontana at sharpeleven.org> wrote:

> On Tue, 15 Apr 2014 16:38:09 +0100
> Gervase Markham <gerv at mozilla.org> wrote:
> 
>> 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.
> 
> That's a useful observation, though I can't figure out whether it's
> relevant to OSI approval. Gerv's reading is correct, isn't it?
> 
> Therefore, isn't this in effect a completely unbounded patent license?
> To take Gerv's example, suppose LARGER_WORKS.TXT says "Java SE". That
> means whoever controls what "Java SE" means can control the scope of
> this patent license grant throughout the remaining life of Java SE, in
> ways that are unpredictable to the licensor. There are things in Java
> SE 8 that no one would have expected to be in, I dunno, Java SE 5 (or
> J2SE 5 if that's what it was called).
> 
> And if so, why not just be more straightforward and say "Licensor
> licenses all of its patents to you royalty free for any purpose
> whatsoever" and dispense with the LARGER_WORKS.TXT file? If that's the
> intention. If not, I think the license is unclear as to the scope of
> the patent license in ways that could be fairly significant. I
> understand the point that the Apache License 2.0 grant is by comparison
> quite narrow, and some would go on to say it's too narrow (some might
> say it's not narrow enough), but this license goes way beyond to the
> opposite extreme. I think that is also something that makes it
> different from any previous OSI license submission.
> 
> This seems arguably to remove the advantage of having an explicit patent
> license instead of whatever we have with the MIT license. It's an
> explicit patent license, but I have no idea what it cover other than
> possibly "potentially my entire patent portfolio". Again, as I keep
> saying, not sure if this is an OSI/OSD issue.
> 
> - RF
> 
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