Personally, I am conflicted with the idea of exact conditions and requirements of a LICENSE not being fully specified in the LICENSE itself. It almost seems like a way to "get around" at least OSI approval, plus it adds (IMO) confusion. It is quite possible to have an OSI approved licensed s/w package be made "non-open source" by careful crafting of the PATENTS file, which bothers and concerns me.
> On Dec 1, 2016, at 11:26 PM, Richard Fontana <font...@opensource.org> wrote: > > > The OSI has received several inquiries concerning its opinion on the > licensing of React [1], which is essentially the 3-clause BSD license > along with, in a separate file, an 'Additional Grant of Patent Rights' > [2]. > > The Additional Grant of Patent Rights is a patent license grant that > includes certain termination criteria. These termination criteria are > not entirely unprecedented when you look at the history of patent > license provisions in OSI-approved licenses, but they are certainly > broader than the termination criteria [or the equivalent] in several > familiar modern licenses (the Apache License 2.0, EPL, MPL 2.0, and > GPLv3). > > The 'Additional Grant' has attracted a fair amount of criticism (as > did an earlier version which apparently resulted in some revisions by > Facebook). There was a recent blog post by Robert Pierce of El Camino > Legal [3] (which among other things argues that the React patent > license is not open source). Luis Villa wrote an interesting response > [4]. > > What do members of the license-discuss community think about the > licensing of React? I see a few issues here: > > - does the breadth of the React patent termination criteria raise > OSD-conformance issues or otherwise indicate that React should not > be considered open source? > > - is it good practice, and does it affect the open source status of > software, to supplement OSI-approved licenses with separate patent > license grants or nonasserts? (This has been done by some other > companies without significant controversy.) > > - if the React patent license should be seen as not legitimate from an > OSI/OSD perspective, what about the substantial number of > past-approved (if now mostly obsolete) licenses that incorporated > patent license grants with comparably broad termination criteria? > > - should Facebook be encouraged to seek OSI approval for the React > license including the patent license grant? > > Richard > > > [1] https://facebook.github.io/react/ > > [2] https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/master/PATENTS > > [3] > http://www.elcaminolegal.com/single-post/2016/10/04/Facebook-Reactjs-License > > [4] http://lu.is/blog/2016/10/31/reacts-license-necessary-and-open/ > _______________________________________________ > License-discuss mailing list > License-discuss@opensource.org > https://lists.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss _______________________________________________ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@opensource.org https://lists.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss
