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To be truly open source, code needs to be usable without requiring
further permissions, including spending money acquiring patent
licenses. As someone who has been a member of the board at the
Open Source Initiative for many years, I can tell you that these
sorts of patent clauses are considered to be a feature of
all modern open source licenses. The patent clauses in the EPL,
ALv2 and similar licenses have been carefully constructed, and are
broadly accepted by industry. The ALv2 in particular is very
popular precisely because of its patent license (which is almost
identical to the EPL's), coupled with permissive copyright terms.
On 2/16/2016 3:56 PM, Jay Jay Billings wrote:
Well, in fairness, I hear complaints from nonmembers
about the patent clause in the EPL all the time. Our attorney at
ORNL wrestled with it for awhile before he was comfortable with
it too. In the end he decided it was fine.
UCB had previously objected to a request from someone
on my team on ground of the EPL patent clause, so I think they
just really don't like it.
Jay
On Feb 16, 2016 3:35 PM, "Mike
Milinkovich" < mike.milinkovich@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
On 2/16/2016 2:35 PM, Erwin de Ley wrote:
From the analysis by Christopher
below, it would seem that a rather small
addition/modification in the standard EPL could enable
academic/research institutions to actively participate in
Eclipse open-source projects. Whereas the current EPL
patent clause seems to prohibit that.
Changing open source license terms is an extremely
time-consuming and difficult thing to do. However, for those
who are interested in such things there are on-going (but
currently dormant) discussions about revising the EPL at epl-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxx
Personally I don't understand such
legal details, but the issue encountered for UC Berkeley
is probably widely applicable to many more US institutions
(and European ones as well I guess). And it would seem
that the Science IWG is specifically impacted by this as
we're targeting research/academic instutions a.o.
UC Berkley is the first institution in 12 years to raise
these concerns. I would not rush to any assumptions about
their conclusions.
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