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

[Henrik Ingo]

Jim,

I don't think you answered Josh' real question. (Or alternatively I
misunderstood his concern.)

I understood your previous replies such that the license can be used
*both* like a CLA or just a normal license:

For project A, inbound contributions would use UPL but Oracle would
remove all UPL references and distribute it under GPL + proprietary
terms. (An example of A is Java.)

Separately you said you are optimistic Oracle would also use UPL as an
outbound license for project B. (Where B is currently unknown.)

To be clear, I don't share Josh' concern for A (assuming I understood
him correctly, which I don't always do). I thinkwhat you propose is a
valid use of a permissive license and UPL would work well for that.
For example, in many cases the library A_minor would perhaps be
available as a separate github repository where it is generally
available under UPL, even if the UPL is then removed when A_minor is
included in the larger project A. Even if this sometimes is not the
case, it would still not be a worse situation than the current use of
1-to-1 CLA agreements.

henrik

On Wed, May 7, 2014 at 11:02 PM, Jim Wright <jim.wright at oracle.com> wrote:
> Sure Josh - it's clearly not just a CLA even if we ourselves weren't going to use it for any other purposes, but in any event that doesn't matter as I hope to use it as an outbound too (and hope others will as well obviously).
>
>  Regards,
>   Jim
>
>
> On May 6, 2014, at 12:29 PM, Josh Berkus <josh at postgresql.org> wrote:
>
>> On 05/06/2014 12:06 PM, Henrik Ingo wrote:
>>> On Tue, May 6, 2014 at 8:18 PM, Josh Berkus <josh at postgresql.org> wrote:
>>>> Huh?  I was assuming that Oracle *would* be distributing any such works
>>>> under the UPL.  Why would they need a new license if they didn't intend
>>>> to use it for outbound distribution?
>>>
>>> My understanding is the UPL would replace or be an alternative to the
>>> inbound Contributor License Agreement. So for example you would use
>>> the UPL to contribute a piece of code to Java, but within the Java
>>> codebase that code would then be GPL+proprietary dual licensed.
>>
>> Jim?  Can you comment on this?  If Oracle is *only* going to be using
>> this license inbound, then it's really a CLA, even though it looks like
>> a license, as as such beyond the purview of this committee.
>>
>> --Josh Berkus
>



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