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

[Henrik Ingo]

On Wed, Sep 3, 2014 at 6:15 PM, Jim Wright <jim.wright at oracle.com> wrote:
> > I appreciate that the text in parenthesis was added as a
> > clarification, however I'm afraid the current text can be read in the
> > other extreme instead: In practice it would often forbid creation of
> > any derivative works, since any non-trivial modification is more than
> > likely to infringe on somebody's patent, or at least that somebody
> > could easily claim that it does. For example, say that IBM is the
> > original author of some code to which I add some functionality, it's
> > clearly quite possible that my new functionality infringes on IBM's
> > vast patent portfolio. The above text could then be read as saying
> > that I'm not allowed to create a derivative work at all - not just
> > that the original patent grant doesn't extend to the derivative work.
> >
> > I'm sorry as I'm neither a lawyer or native English speaker, I will
> > not attempt to come up with a better sentence, but I hope you
> > understand what I'm criticising here.
> >
> > henrik
> >
>
> Mr. Cowan's response is the right one here - this is not a proscription
> on creating a derivative work, it simply limits the scope of the patent
> license to the Software and the designated Larger Works.  I don't think
> many would read this as barring other derivative works, as such a
> construction would also bar them under other permissive licenses
> like BSD and Apache.   The feedback I got from the community here
> is that patent holders will not agree to a scope which licenses all their
> patents for any arbitrary modification, and in fact would be nervous
> about a license which could possibly be interpreted this way, thus the
> clarification - of course, you still *could* apply the license this way by
> simply stating that all derivative works are covered (and thanks in
> advance if you do ;-), which would be even broader than I intended the
> original draft.
>

Yes. I understand what your intent is and I understand the motivation
of the patent holders behind this. However, what I'm saying is that
the text currently does not say this, and it says something else that
is pretty much the opposite of what you want to say. So the text just
needs to be fixed.

What you want to say is that while derivative works are allowed, no
patent grants (or other rights?) are given to the new functionality.
Currently the text doesn't say that. It says that derivative works are
only allowed "provided that this does not" X, where X is likely to
always be true. In other words the words "provided that" is what I
have an issue with. The right to do derivative works in itself should
always be allowed.

henrik

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