[License-discuss] [DISCUSS] PUWL v1.0 – P-EADCA Universal Waiver License

[Balázs Hámorszky]

Thank you all for the thoughtful feedback so far.

I really appreciate the time you’ve taken to read PUWL and highlight
the issues around concatenation, CC0’s patent disclaimer, SPDX
requirements, and the copyright status of license texts.

I’ll review these points in detail and come back with
an updated version and/or follow-up questions.

The idea behind PUWL is to provide the broadest possible "Universal Waiver"
in every jurisdiction. That’s why I combined several existing permissive/waiver
licenses. A clarification that they apply in order rather than simultaneously
might help, but I’m also considering whether writing a new, cleaner text
would be the better path.

One extra question: is there any legal risk in using the current draft “as is”
in my own repositories?

Thanks again for the constructive input, it’s been very helpful.

Best regards,
Balázs

On Wed, Oct 1, 2025 at 7:06 PM Nicholas Matthew Neft Weinstock via
License-discuss <license-discuss at lists.opensource.org> wrote:
>
> Also (and perhaps a bit ironically), many open source licenses are protected by Copyright, which does not allow this sort of ad-hoc copying into a different license.  Including the Creative Commons licenses.
>
> -Nick
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: License-discuss <license-discuss-bounces at lists.opensource.org> On Behalf Of McCoy Smith
> Sent: Wednesday, October 1, 2025 6:58 AM
> To: license-discuss at lists.opensource.org
> Subject: Re: [License-discuss] [DISCUSS] PUWL v1.0 – P-EADCA Universal Waiver License
>
> WARNING: This email originated from outside of Qualcomm. Please be wary of any links or attachments, and do not enable macros.
>
> The problem I see with this one is it seems to be a concatenation of a bunch of different highly-permissive ("-0") licenses or other public domain dedications, without any indication of whether all, or the one the licensee chooses, applies.
>
> As an example of how this is a problem, CC-0 is one of the licenses concatenated. CC-0 has a disclaimer of patent licenses which makes it likely violative of OSD (in fact, IIRC, CC-0 was submitted to OSI for approval and rejected for that reason).
>
> So you'd want to at a minimum clear that up.
>
> On 10/1/2025 6:08 AM, Kevin P. Fleming wrote:
> > On Tue, Sep 30, 2025, at 12:40, Balázs Hámorszky wrote:
> >> PUWL is a permissive / waiver-style license that aims to:
> >>    • Waive all rights that can legally be waived, in all jurisdictions,
> >>    • Disclaim all liability,
> >>    • Provide a universal fallback where full waiver is not recognized,
> >>    • Combine several existing public-domain-style approaches into a
> >> single text
> >>
> >> The full text and README (with philosophy and usage instructions) are here:
> >>    → https://github.com/balihb/PUWL
> >>
> >> My intent is to first ask for informal feedback, before submitting it
> >> to the formal license-review process.
> >> I’d appreciate any comments or concerns you may have.
> > Since your intent sounds very similar to CC-0, can you describe how your license differs from that one?
> >
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