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

[Smith, McCoy]

Although this is ultimately a question that OSI may wish to resolve, I have always read OSD 5 in the following way:
5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups
The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons *by denying any person or group of person the rights under OSD 1-3 & 6-10.*
That reading is, I believe, consistent with the annotation that “In order to get the maximum benefit from the process, the maximum diversity of persons and groups should be equally eligible to contribute to open sources. Therefore we forbid any open-source license from locking anybody out of the process.”
As an example of where a contrary reading of OSD 5 would produce a result that would be problematic, GPLv3’s “Installation Information” requirement imposes different obligations on users depending on the particular types of devices on which they have written their code to run.  That isn’t, to my mind, “discrimination,” as it does not deny those users right rights to freely redistribute, to get source, to make derivatives, etc.

From: License-review [mailto:license-review-bounces at opensource.org] On Behalf Of Luis Villa
Sent: Tuesday, November 29, 2016 7:30 AM
To: henrik.ingo at avoinelama.fi; License submissions for OSI review
Subject: Re: [License-review] Submission of the Upstream Compatibility License v1.0 (UCL-1.0) for approval


+1 to all this. Like Henrik, I didn't read the license, so this is not a comment on the particular license, but many of our licenses have always permitted a variety of imbalances between various participants in the ecosystem. If this is a bad idea, OSI should say that for all those other arrangements as well, and figure out how to formalize that rule, rather than stretching the non-discrimination principle.

Luis
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