[License-review] Submission of the Upstream Compatibility License v1.0 (UCL-1.0) for approval

Josh berkus josh at postgresql.org
Tue Nov 29 06:13:29 UTC 2016


On 11/28/2016 05:50 PM, Richard Fontana wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 28, 2016 at 05:43:35PM -0800, Josh berkus wrote:
>> On 11/28/2016 05:01 PM, Richard Fontana wrote:
>>> I recognize one can argue that OSD 5 is intended to address different
>>> kinds of discriminatory treatment. Ultimately I think this should be
>>> decided by evolving community standards; it's not particularly an
>>> issue of legal judgment and so lawyers will be of limited usefulness. 
>>
>> Can we get a ruling from the Board on license assymetry?  If we can have
>> a judgement on this, then it would make future discussions of similar
>> licenses easy.
> 
> I will raise the issue - so it's essentially 'are asymmetrical
> arrangements in a license ever enough of a reason for not approving a
> license as Open Source'. An example of an asymmetrical arrangement is
> a copyleft license where the original licensor gets a special
> permissive license covering downstream modifications.

Note that Nigel said it would be acceptable to him to modify the license
so that it worked differently, where the original code was copyleft but
downstream modifications would be permissively licensed.  I believe
that's somewhat less asymmetrical, as the modifications would be
permissively licensed for *everyone*.

The real question there is (a) can one license require the use of a
different license on modifications, legally, and (b) if so, is that a
violation of anti-discrimination?

I really think Nigel's case is more interesting than you're giving it
credit for; even if we don't approve the license, it's the most
discussion-worthy proposal we've had since the NASA license.

--Josh Berkus




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