[License-review] For Approval: OpenMDW License Agreement, versions 1.1 (OpenMDW-1.1)

[Luis Villa]

> On 8/13/26 14:00, Pamela Chestek wrote:
> > I recall a presentation at a conference many years ago tracing the
> > history of different licenses and the scope of revocation. As I recall
> > it, there was an expansion to include copyright termination but then
> > that retracted back to just patent. Can anyone provide some color on the
> > thinking about why copyright termination may or should be disfavored
> > upon a patent infringement claim?


[I'm not getting all emails to the list, so only seeing this by way of
reply.]

My understanding from conversations during drafting of MPL 2 was simply
that when the clause was first written (for NPL 1.0, which I believe
created the concept), the main concern was inter-corporate warfare: Sun
going after Netscape, Netscape going after IBM, etc. So the termination was
scoped with the assumption that both sides would have patents and so
patents were sufficient for MAD.

As we started seeing suggestions that patent-holders might go after
contributors who did not themselves hold patents, we tried to figure out
how to give some recourse. Given the high market penetration of Firefox
everywhere at the time, extending the reciprocity principle to copyright
seemed like a reasonable defensive step to take.

[Again, genuinely not commenting on the new license, which I haven't read
and haven't gamed out in the complicated current moment.]
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.org/attachments/20260815/1245ce28/attachment.htm>