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

[Josh Berkus]

On 05/07/2014 10:55 PM, Henrik Ingo wrote:
> Jim,
> 
> I don't think you answered Josh' real question. (Or alternatively I 
> misunderstood his concern.)

I think you may have.  My concern is much simpler.

> 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).

My concern is: if Oracle isn't planning to distribute any software under
this license, I don't see the point in us approving it.  I'm pretty
solidly on the anti-proliferation end this committee, so I'm going to
vote against any licence which the submitter doesn't intend to actually
use to distribute software, even if the license otherwise makes sense.
The OSI historically has not been in the practice of approving new
licenses to fill holes in the license portfolio just because those holes
exist.

Other license submitters who come to this committee, even the so-called
"crayon licenses", have a specific piece of software in mind that they
want to distribute under that license.  In many cases, they are already
using the license and are asking for approval.  Submitters who are large
publicly traded companies may not share which specific projects those
are with this committee (Microsoft did not), but their reason for
requesting the license is invariably that they have specific code to be
distributed under it.  Therefore, it causes me significant concern that
the submitter of this license is extremely vague about their uses for it.

If Oracle is unsure of when or if they plan to use this license, then my
suggestion is to wait and come back for approval when Oracle has a
specific plan for it.  I find it unlikely that the OSI would take longer
to approve a license than it would take to open-source a piece of
internal software at a large company.

--Josh Berkus