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

[Henrik Ingo]

On Sat, Aug 30, 2014 at 8:56 AM, John Cowan <cowan at mercury.ccil.org> wrote:
> Henrik Ingo scripsit:
>
>> "...sold, copy, create derivative works of (provided that this does
>> not license additional patent claims beyond those covering the
>> unmodified Software and Larger Works), display, perform, distribute,
>> and sublicense the Software and the Larger Work(s) on either these or
>> other terms."
>>
>> I appreciate that the text in parenthesis was added as a
>> clarification, however I'm afraid the current text can be read in the
>> other extreme instead: In practice it would often forbid creation of
>> any derivative works, since any non-trivial modification is more than
>> likely to infringe on somebody's patent, or at least that somebody
>> could easily claim that it does.
>
> The text doesn't forbid you from infringing patents, it merely warns
> you that you might be doing so, because you have no license to use
> (etc.) patents unless they are both needed for the original work *and*
> held by the licensor.
>

For clarity, cutting the relevant parts out of this
mega-single-sentence license:

"permission is hereby granted, free of charge and under any and all
patent and copyright rights [...] to deal in both [a) and b)] without
restriction, including without limitation the rights to [...] create
derivative works of (provided that this does not license additional
patent claims beyond those covering the unmodified Software and Larger
Works), [...] the Software and the Larger Work(s) on either these or
other terms."

To me this sentence says that creating derivative works is only
allowed to the extent that modifications will not infringe on any new
patents of the licensor granting this license. Which means in many
cases (e.g. IBM or any other large patent holder as the upstream
licensor) only very trivial modifications would be allowed.

I believe the reason you do not agree with this interpretation is that
you try to apply common sense while interpreting this sentence,
whereas my point is that the literal interpretation is different from
the common sense one. Based on the surrounding email text, my literal
interpretation is clearly also not what is intended by Jim.

henrik



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