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

[Richard Fontana]

On Tue, 15 Apr 2014 16:38:09 +0100
Gervase Markham <gerv at mozilla.org> wrote:

> Are you saying that if I contribute a one-line patch to a piece of UPL
> code, and that UPL code is used in the Java SDK and lists "Java SDK"
> in its LARGER_WORKS.TXT file, I have just freely licensed any patent
> I or my company owns that covers anything in the Java SDK?
> 
> That seems... broad.

That's a useful observation, though I can't figure out whether it's
relevant to OSI approval. Gerv's reading is correct, isn't it?

Therefore, isn't this in effect a completely unbounded patent license?
To take Gerv's example, suppose LARGER_WORKS.TXT says "Java SE". That
means whoever controls what "Java SE" means can control the scope of
this patent license grant throughout the remaining life of Java SE, in
ways that are unpredictable to the licensor. There are things in Java
SE 8 that no one would have expected to be in, I dunno, Java SE 5 (or
J2SE 5 if that's what it was called).
 
And if so, why not just be more straightforward and say "Licensor
licenses all of its patents to you royalty free for any purpose
whatsoever" and dispense with the LARGER_WORKS.TXT file? If that's the
intention. If not, I think the license is unclear as to the scope of
the patent license in ways that could be fairly significant. I
understand the point that the Apache License 2.0 grant is by comparison
quite narrow, and some would go on to say it's too narrow (some might
say it's not narrow enough), but this license goes way beyond to the
opposite extreme. I think that is also something that makes it
different from any previous OSI license submission.

This seems arguably to remove the advantage of having an explicit patent
license instead of whatever we have with the MIT license. It's an
explicit patent license, but I have no idea what it cover other than
possibly "potentially my entire patent portfolio". Again, as I keep
saying, not sure if this is an OSI/OSD issue.

 - RF