13 ms·

The Lil License

126 points by jashkenas 9y ago

Dayshine 9y ago
What did your lawyers say?
brotherjerky 9y ago
Obvious XKCD is obvious: https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/ I really admire the goals here, and I read through the FAQ ... but I feel like this just adds to the noise. As much as a respect Jeremy, I'd be a little cautious about using this text written by a non-lawyer.
adrianN 9y ago
Having a nonstandard licence on your code basically ensures that no corporation will use your project. Internal clearing processes become a lot more expensive if it's not one of the approved licences.
- fiatjaf 9y ago
  Good to know, but for 99% of personal open-source projects on GitHub I think that really shouldn't matter.
- whipoodle 9y ago
  Indeed, it's a tactic.
- jashkenas 9y ago
  That may be true, but with that attitude, we'll all still be using MIT in 2047. The hope here is for it to become a standard license in short order, if people find it useful. That includes SPDX submission, OSI approval, and then inclusion in Github's licensing apparatus. Specifically, I'd like to think that corporations would find it significantly more comfortable to use software under LIL than under MIT: They won't have to worry as much about unknown patents held by the authors, and they won't have to worry about future legal disputes with third-party contributors. Both of those are significant issues today — this very week, even. That said, if you want something permissive, but lawyered-up and bulletproof, use Apache. This isn't intended to compete with Apache. It's intended to compete with what folks actually use and love, which is MIT.
- nerdponx 9y ago
  That's a shame. Kudos to them for trying to improve the MIT license, and for explicitly incorporating a contributor license agreement. However, it would probably behoove them to actually get an actual lawyer to take a look at the license, if only to have some kind of up-front certification for adopters that the thing won't get them sued or taken advantage of. There are several changes from the original MIT language that indicate they might not know what they're doing any more than your average Hackernews. For instance, putting warranty disclaimers in all caps is common practice and it's done for a reason [0], but they evidently didn't bother to search "warranty all caps" on DuckDuckGo and decide "you know what, it's fine, we can live with an all-caps clause." To my untrained eye, it looks fine, but who knows what might cause it to get torn up in court. Which of course proves your point: no corporation will use a LIL licensed project at least until it's been vetted or tested or reviewed somehow. Lil license: Permission is hereby granted by the authors of this software, to any person, to use the software for any purpose, free of charge, including the rights to run, read, copy, change, distribute and sell it, and including usage rights to any patents the authors may hold on it, subject to the following conditions: This license, or a link to its text, must be included with all copies of the software and any derivative works. Any modification to the software submitted to the authors may be incorporated into the software under the terms of this license. The software is provided "as is", without warranty of any kind, including but not limited to the warranties of title, fitness, merchantability and non-infringement. The authors have no obligation to provide support or updates for the software, and may not be held liable for any damages, claims or other liability arising from its use. Expat license: Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE. [0]: http://www.partingthoughts.net/why-are-warranty-disclaimers-in-all-caps/ http://www.partingthoughts.net/why-are-warranty-disclaimers-...
- StavrosK 9y ago
  Are you really bothered about corporations not being able to use your code? Corporations generally make money from code without paying for it, which ranks them very low on my list of people to cater to with my licenses. I want my licenses to cater to hobbyists/hackers/tinkerers and maybe small businesses first, if corporations don't like it they can pay me to relicense things for them.
  - gregmac 9y ago
    When I'm choosing a library to use for a personal project, I do put some consideration if I'm likely and would be able to use it at work. If I end up contributing to the library (and I have), it's nice to be able to use the one with my own contributions in it at work as well.
- belorn 9y ago
  I have seen many games with license text that says things like "We asked and got permission from the author". You don't get any more nonstandard than emailing some author and getting permission, yet it seems fairly common in even AAA games. So let me theorize why that is. Game studios is always short on time, short on developers, and short on money. If doing something nonstandard will save you days/weeks/months of developer time, that is features and bug fixes that otherwise might never be done. There is no room to be religious about which license the #38 library that you use as long it don't conflict with the business model of developing and selling games. Only industries where competition is slower and there is a disconnect between development and revenue can people care strongly about having only licenses they like.
- schindlabua 9y ago
  Bit off topic, but is the WTFPL considered a standard licence? If I want to give people the ability to do whatever the fuck they want to with my code, is the WTFPL considered a good choice?
  - burntsushi 9y ago
    I used it for a while in a project. Just about everybody was fine with it except for Google. I got several emails from Google employees over the years saying that they could not use it unless I changed the license.
    - raphlinus 9y ago
      This is true, and now there's public documentation that explains a little more of the rationale: https://opensource.google.com/docs/thirdparty/licenses/#wtfpl-not-allowed https://opensource.google.com/docs/thirdparty/licenses/#wtfp...
      - cdelsolar 9y ago
        Is the JSON license allowed?
  - ryan_lane 9y ago
    A basic thing to consider about WTFPL is that it's essentially equivalent to public domain, which doesn't exist in some countries, making your software unusable in those countries. Developers seem to love this license because it's cute, short, and uses foul language, but it's a license that no one should use.
- yellowapple 9y ago
  Plenty of corporations use non-standard licenses, seeing as how pretty much every non-FOSS license out there is non-standard (and in the case of enterprise software, often not even standard across every instance of a given product).
xena 9y ago
Why not CC0?
- cpburns2009 9y ago
  The Lil license seems to have a patent grant [1]: > Permission is hereby granted by the authors of this software, ... and including usage rights to any patents the authors may hold on it, ... And CC0 does not [2]: > No trademark or patent rights held by Affirmer are waived, abandoned, surrendered, licensed or otherwise affected by this document. That appears to be the motivation of this over other existing, minimal licenses. [1]: http://lillicense.org/v1.html http://lillicense.org/v1.html [2]: https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/133/how-could-using-code-released-under-cc0-infringe-on-the-authors-patents https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/133/how-could...
- Flimm 9y ago
  Creative Commons advise users against using CC0 for code. CC0 also got caught in a technicality, causing it to never get approved or disapproved as an open source license by the OSI.
  - edflsafoiewq 9y ago
    Nevertheless, I've noticed CC0 used by crypto stuff lately (keccak, Argon2).
  - insertnickname 9y ago
    CC does not advise against using CC0 for software, only their regular CC licenses. See: https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC0_FAQ#May_I_apply_CC0_to_computer_software.3F_If_so.2C_is_there_a_recommended_implementation.3F https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC0_FAQ#May_I_apply_CC...
maxlybbert 9y ago
I thought the open source community had matured beyond the need for everybody to write their own license.
- yellowapple 9y ago
  I thought the open source community had matured beyond the need for everybody to use a single one-size-fits-all license in complete ignorance of their actual needs and goals.
  - maxlybbert 9y ago
    They grew out of that before they realized there's little value in writing a new license when there are already so many to chose from. I was just starting out when Google Code announced it would only host projects that used an approved license, and Google had a very short list of approved licenses. Sourceforge was more flexible than that, but they still discouraged people from striking out on their own. It took me a while, but I was eventually grateful to Google for being so effective at hitting the brakes. Opensource.org currently lists 83 approved licenses. Fsf.org has a similar list. For a new license to be valuable to me it has to be measurably better than each of those 83 licenses in some way that matters to me. Otherwise it's an annoyance, at best.
  - yarrel 9y ago
    Their needs and goals are open source (sic) software. Unsolving this problem would be self-defeating.
jordigh 9y ago
While I appreciate the intent, patents are complicated, and the reason more complicated and weak licenses like the Apache license version 2 exist are precisely to address the complexity of patents. Software nerds don't like complicated licenses just because they're not lawyers, but legal complexity is inherent in human affairs and cannot be simplified too much. The shortest license isn't necessarily the most desirable one. Writing a new license just because the Apache license is tl;dr is just not a good idea. Saying that you'll just ignore the law because you disagree with it will actually probably work out for a while until you're big enough for the law to no longer ignore you in return. We've had amateur licenses written many times before. GPLv1 and the first Perl license are examples. They both had to be rewritten once someone who actually knows law looked them over. In other words, kids, don't try this at home. There are professionals who can do this for you.
- jashkenas 9y ago
  Totally. And if it's a terrible idea, then it will die a quiet death, and that will be fine. But there's a little more here than just "don't try this at home." The Apache license is a wonderful license. If you want to use it, you absolutely should use it. But people don't use it. They prefer to use something they can understand, something that doesn't have to be interpreted by a legal team, and something that they can feel comfortable imposing on the users of their code. According to a 2015 survey conducted by Github, MIT and BSD simple licenses are nearly five times more often used than Apache. Out of the top ten most starred open source projects, nine of them use MIT/BSD, and only one uses Apache. Clearly, there's a desire — in the actual practice of sharing open source — for something that explains your legal and social obligations in as plain an English as we can muster, while still being crystal clear in legal terms.
  - jordigh 9y ago
    I'm pretty sure that's because Github encouraged, and to some extent still does, for people to completely ignore licenses. This attitude spreads and explains why people want the least amount of license posible. The solution isn't to make licenses more "user-friendly". That user friendliness can be a dangerous illusion. The solution is to not forget the legal lessons that we already lived back before free software was renamed to open source in 1998.
jstimpfle 9y ago
I've had the impression lately that people are overly scared of licenses. Like, on the level that a forgotten dot or so at the end could completely change the meaning as seen by jurisdiction. IANAL, but I don't feel that's the case. I'm actually pretty sure you could just put "You're free to use this software for whatever you want" in a somewhat obvious central location, and your users would be good. The obvious intent counts. The BSD licenses don't seem to do more (besides adding a few restrictions for the user). WTFPL is another good example license. I haven't really heard that it's a bad or jurisdictionally "invalid" license. (But sure, for "big" stuff I guess the comment by adrianN applies).
- nerdponx 9y ago
  AFAIK there are certain rights that copyright holders can't actually waive in certain jurisdictions.
  - jstimpfle 9y ago
    Yes, I have heard that the term "public domain" doesn't exist in some places and that might technically mean no rights are granted to the user at all, or something along these lines. And for that reason, some projects have some kind of dual-license ("this code is in the public domain, or totally free in case there is no such concept in your country"). But again I feel like that's acting and being scared without any evidence. (And it seems really silly to me that an author would actually have to adopt to the country of the user). There is very little official statements to find on the internet. All I've ever heard about is these big corporations taking nasty fights, and that seems to scare people with their little tinker projects to death. Realistically, I would be surprised if e.g. the MIT license was actually more user-friendly than the WTFPL. I'd love to hear about these thoughts from actual lawyers!
    - slfront 9y ago
      I AM NOT A LAWYER. THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE. The problems with public domain dedication across jurisdictional lines, as I understand them, are: 1. Users (who are aware of how the law works, in general terms) in a country that doesn't recognize a right to relinquish copyright to the public domain will be afraid of getting sued, so they won't use the software. It might as well not be open source for them. 2. Contributors to your public domain software from those countries are not allowed to relinquish copyright in their works to the public domain, and as a result you're actually accepting work under copyright into your otherwise-public-domain software, which means it's not really public domain software any longer, because of mutual copyright observance agreements between those countries. Thus, for instance, because the US recognizes German copyrights, and Germany doesn't allow dedication of copyrightable works to the public domain, a German contributing code to a public domain work in the US actually contaminates the public domain work with code covered by copyright, thus making it no longer a (pure) public domain work, even in the US, because of US recognition of German copyrights. If the German in the above example actually transfers the copyright to you, then YOU dedicate the work to the public domain, that might work. I'm just guessing, though, and I'm pretty sure it would require some explicit legally binding (and provable) statements about transferring copyright to you.
dmm 9y ago
Please just use the ISC license. It's a permissive license that is as short as modern law allows. It's well understood and accepted. It's the default license for node.js packages and the preferred license for OpenBSD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISC_license https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISC_license Here it is in it's entirety: Copyright <YEAR> <OWNER> Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies. THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND THE AUTHOR DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES WITH REGARD TO THIS SOFTWARE INCLUDING ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR BE LIABLE FOR ANY SPECIAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM LOSS OF USE, DATA OR PROFITS, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, NEGLIGENCE OR OTHER TORTIOUS ACTION, ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE USE OR PERFORMANCE OF THIS SOFTWARE.
- nerdponx 9y ago
  ISC, like MIT/Expat, lacks a contributor license agreement. Is it implied that any contribution to an ISC-licensed (or MIT-licensed) project is granted to the original author?
  - gras 9y ago
    Of course not, licenses are for granting rights to use copyrighted works, not for transfering copyright. I also don't see why open source contributors should give away the copyright to their work. All it accomplishes, is that the "original author" (= the copyright holder, usually a company) can re-license the work without agreement from all contributors. It strips contributors from parts of their rights.
    - nerdponx 9y ago
      So if I fix a piece of buggy open-source code and my patch is merged, then I "own" the bug fix and the author no longer owns that portion of the program? Is that really what you're proposing? It makes sense in the case where I contribute, say, an entire new module. Then I should have the right to do with it as I please. But there needs to be a line drawn somewhere, and I sure as hell couldn't tell you where.
beefhash 9y ago
A tech project or project that is related to tech that does not have its primary domain serving HTTPS? It's hosted on GitHub Pages. Every single time.
amattn 9y ago
The contributor statement is new to me and definitely the highlight of this license: > Any modification to the software submitted to the authors may be incorporated into the software under the terms of this license. I'd love something like this become a little more common. Making contributors sign paperwork is a tremendous hassle. Hopefully the OSI (https://opensource.org/licenses https://opensource.org/licenses) will take a crack at this one soon. If it shows up on their list, I can see adoption ramping up.
0xbear 9y ago
Just use Apache 2.0. Don’t invent new licenses, there are way too many already. Unless your project offers something extraordinary, a custom license not written by an IP lawyer == no use of your code in any project where lawyers have to review the licensing.
jashkenas 9y ago
Friends, I totally get the initial instinct to think "Aieeee! Not another amateur open source software license! Those things breed like flies!" But if you wouldn't mind taking two minutes to read the text of the license before giving in to that feeling — I think you'll find that it might put you more at ease than what you're currently using — if you're using MIT. Like MIT and ISC, it's short and sweet and comprehensible, and like Apache it tries to establish common standards around potential patent use and contributions back to the codebase. It hits a sweet spot that, for me, doesn't exist in anything currently on the OSI's long list of licenses. I did run it by a couple of lawyers and a couple of open source developers before publishing it this morning. But I don't believe that review should matter too much to you: An OSS license is an agreement between the author and the user of the software. If they can both easily understand it to mean the same thing, then we can feel that we're on solid ground. That's why we use MIT today.
- tptacek 9y ago
  Unfortunately, I've been conditioned by the scary stories 'DannyBee tells here to worry about new license language that doesn't come directly from lawyers. It sounds like you've actually had lawyers look at it. A blurb anywhere on this page indicating that it's been vetted this would be pretty powerful!
  - jashkenas 9y ago
    It may be pretty powerful, but I'm uncomfortable believing that it really should be. For starters, every lawyer has a different opinion, a different style of preferred phrasing, and a different understanding of what open source software is. Ultimately the parties involved are you, your users and your contributors. Most of us don't have lawyers. That said, I think it might be effective to put some short legal opinions, from experts in this particular field, into the FAQ. If anyone's listening: that would make for a great pull request. The goal here is to make this thing as shipshape, watertight and bulletproof as possible, while remaining "simpler than MIT". Then it becomes the license I would have always wanted to use.
    - 9y ago
jwilk 9y ago
Don't roll your own crypto, er, I mean legal.
102030485868 9y ago
"distribute and sell": but what if I just want to distribute? Oxford commas are important. See: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/16/us/oxford-comma-lawsuit.html?mcubz=0 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/16/us/oxford-comma-lawsuit.h...
- jstimpfle 9y ago
  This is not a situation where Oxford commas are needed to disambiguate. The way you see it, I think an Oxford comma would force you to do even more things at the same time. But that's silly; this statement is granting you rights, and it's your choice on whether you want to exercise them or not. If some rights can be exercised only conditionally, the text needs to make that clear.
amelius 9y ago
> Permission is hereby granted by the authors of this software, (...) and including usage rights to any patents the authors may hold on it, (...) But what if the source code is modified? Will the users still get the usage right of the patents? And what if the source code is modified so much that the original code is barely recognizable? It seems to me that using this license means you're giving away your patents for free.
- belorn 9y ago
  > original code is barely recognizable Will the original authors still have copyright over it? If yes: Then clearly in the mind of the law the original work is still present. If no: Then the license choice of the original authors is not longer relevant.
  - amelius 9y ago
    Let me rephrase: users could use the software only to gain free access to the patents. Thus this license is like giving away access to the patents.
    - jashkenas 9y ago
      The intent is to provide users of the software with full confidence that by using the software, they will not be held liable for infringing on the patents that the authors of and contributors to the software might hold on the software. Other licenses, like Apache, include patent grant withdrawal clauses, where you can lose the right to use the patent if you initiate a lawsuit. The notorious Facebook BSD+PATENTS license includes a similar withdrawal of patent grant, but for any Facebook patent, not just something related to the software in question, and also only if you sue Facebook or a subsidiary — the Apache withdrawal applies to "any entity". Here, there are no withdrawal provisions, hopefully giving you that full confidence as a user. As an author, if you have a patent on something, and then you release an open source project under LIL that uses that patent, you give up the right to sue anyone for infringing on your patent by using your open source project, period. I think that's more in the spirit of open source.
Flimm 9y ago
> Check out License Zero. It helps open source software stay free for use and modification for non-commercial purposes, while commercial users can be required to pay after a trial period. I would delete the words "open source" from this sentence. License Zero is not an open source license, as open source licenses cannot discriminate against commercial uses. See the Open Source Definition by the OSI.
- jashkenas 9y ago
  Thanks for the correction. I've made the change in the FAQ to not describe License Zero as an open source license. On its own website, it's very careful not to.
  - ZenoArrow 9y ago
    Open source or not, thank you for bringing it to my attention, I can see some potential benefits of Licence Zero, especially for larger projects where funding is more important. The Lil licence looks promising too.
    - kemitchell 9y ago
      Thank you both for your interest! For completeness: The original License Zero Public License, now dubbed the License Zero Noncommercial Public License (L0-NC), is admittedly _not_ an Open Source license per OSI's definition. There is now also a draft, alternative public license for L0 projects, The License Zero Reciprocal Public License (L0-R). It's a hair-trigger copyleft-style license, built in much the same way, from a BSD-2-Clause base: https://github.com/licensezero/licensezero-reciprocal-public-license/blob/master/LICENSE.mustache https://github.com/licensezero/licensezero-reciprocal-public... More here: https://medium.com/licensezero/a-hacker-public-license-d28053038b45 https://medium.com/licensezero/a-hacker-public-license-d2805... I believe L0-R _is_ an Open Source license, and have submitted to OSI for approval. I also believe it will be as, if not more effective than L0-NC in driving industrial users to purchase private licenses.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
nobodyorother 9y ago
Please stop making new licenses. You do not need a new license, you need to understand how to use the existing ones and how they interact with one another. The number of license interactions you need to mange on any project is the factorial of the number of licenses in the project. With even just 4 licenses (pretty easy when you're just trying to make it work), that's 24 sets of interactions. Just wait till you get to 7 licenses.
akerro 9y ago
Is this the opposite of react native license?
andrepd 9y ago
Gray on gray text... Just why?
YorickPeterse 9y ago
> Permission is hereby granted by the authors of this software, to any person Person as in what, a natural person? What about non persons such as legal entities? > and including usage rights to any patents the authors may hold on it So the license allows you to use any patents (held by the project author) included in the project, but it doesn't cover anything about patents used by contributors when submitting changes. OK... > Any modification to the software submitted to the authors may be incorporated into the software > under the terms of this license. May? That seems like something that should really be changed to "Any modification to the software submitted [...] will be incorporated into [...]" or something similar that _doesn't_ let people decide about this on the fly. This license as a whole is rather vague, leaving a lot up to interpretation. This isn't something you want from the only thing that stands between you and a potential legal nightmare. Just use good existing licenses such as the MPL 2.0, Apache, GPL (or some flavour of it), or even the MIT license (though I would strongly recommend not using it without a CLA).
- jashkenas 9y ago
  > Person as in what, a natural person? Person as in a legal person. This includes entities like corporations, organizations, representatives and so on: http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/person http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/person > but it doesn't cover anything about patents used by contributors... It tries to. Any change contributed to the project grants permission to incorporate that change under the same terms of the license, which includes the patent grant. This is how people generally tend to behave with open source. > May? That [...] should really be changed to [...] will I also considered "will" and "shall" and "grants permission to" and a few other options, but "may" fits most precisely and succinctly. Submitted contributions aren't necessarily going to be merged into the project, but they may be, and if they are, the act of submission back to the project grants permission to incorporate them under the same terms of the license. http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/may http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/may
  - YorickPeterse 9y ago
    > Person as in a legal person. This includes entities like corporations, > organizations, representatives and so on: > http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/person This may be the case for US law ("person" including both individuals and organisations), but it might also not be the case for all countries across the world. For example, Dutch law seems to define "person" as the individual (e.g. you and me) and seems to use a separate term for legal entities and the likes. It's possible that in practise the two are considered the same but I haven't been able to find such an example. Exactly because of this it's better to be explicit. For example, the MPL 2.0 explicitly defines this: > 1.1. "Contributor" > > means each individual or legal entity that creates, contributes to the > creation of, or owns Covered Software. Here the term "contributor" is used, but the same could apply to the term "person". > It tries to. Any change contributed to the project grants permission to > incorporate that change under the same terms of the license, which > includes the patent grant. The patent grant states that any patents owned by the author can be used by the software's users: > and including usage rights to any patents the authors may hold on it However, nowhere is it stated that patents used for contributions automatically belong (or can be used by) the authors and can thus also be used by the users. Defining what "authors" means could clear things up, though you'll probably want to separate the definition from "contributors" since you probably don't want random "contributors" to also be an "author" (this could give them too much power for example). Again the MPL 2.0 is a good example since it does cover this, albeit not in a single place and in a somewhat hard to grok way.
slfront 9y ago
Try the COIL instead, if the main reason for this license is a patent clause. http://copyfree.org/content/standard/licenses/coil/license.txt http://copyfree.org/content/standard/licenses/coil/license.t... edit: Please stop advertising for AL2. It's not as good a license as people think. It contains some fiddly terms that many people don't even know are there, or don't understand, and is distressingly easy for people to casually violate by accident. Its complexity adds to the problem as well, by offering many opportunities for unintended legal effects in (so far hypothetical) future lawsuits to arise from interactions between parts of the license, a problem with any long license, and AL2 has severe license incompatibility issues as well.
- JamesFM 9y ago
  I've never heard of this license before. Has it been vetted the OSI or the FSF? Also what specifically is bad about the Apache 2 license?
  - slfront 9y ago
    I AM NOT A LAWYER. THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE. It is not certified by either FSF or OSI. The process of getting it evaluated by the OSI and certified involves a lot of money, unless it is such a popular license that the OSI is politically backed into a corner about it. The FSF's politics around such things get downright strange; I'm not even sure what it would take for the FSF to consider a non-GNU license. AL2 contains restrictions such as a requirement to perform bookkeeping when making changes (notes for every modified file about who changed it) and restrictions against changing another file. The bookkeeping restriction is violated with stunning regularity; so far, nobody has been sued over it, as far as I know, but that's true of the majority of license violations anyway. AL2 also, as I mentioned, has some serious license incompatibility problems. Some patent and indemnification material in AL2 is considered incompatible with GNU licenses prior to v3, for instance. In fact, any license that includes a restriction against any connected work being "more restrictive" in some way (which includes GNU licenses, among others) is likely to suffer some significant compatibility issues with any license that has weird quirks like the previously mentioned issues of AL2 (bookkeeping, invariant file), too. The patent termination part of AL2 is unlikely to cause incompatibility with most licenses (GNU licenses are weird, in that regard) unless they come with a restriction on "restrictions" and have a less restrictive patent clause than AL2 (no patent termination, for instance), but the edge cases in AL2 can cause issues with other licenses. I'm not a lawyer (and this is not legal advice), but I think a case could be made in court that AL2 and GPLv3 are actually not compatible at all, because of those clauses, despite what ASF and FSF say. Beyond that, there's just the simple fact of complexity. You've probably heard that software tends toward X bugs per Y lines of code, and that's true for the most straightforward, linear software designs. As the complexity of the design of the software increases, though, the possible unexpected interactions between parts of it increases as well. The result is that, in practical terms, the likelihood of bugs actually increases faster than the number of lines of code. The same effect occurs with legal licensing terms, to some degree; the more complex a software license, the more likely you are to run afoul of unexpected legal effects of the license. AL2 is a rather complex license, much simpler than GPLv3, but significantly more complicated than something like the COIL, especially given the inclusion of the terms I mentioned earlier, which are radical departures from the most widely-used, best-understood "state of the art" of license design.
rbehrends 9y ago
Hmm. As I understand, the primary purpose here is to have a permissive license with a patent grant. Some problems I see: 1. If you're actually have patent claims to your name (a minority of people, while every author is ipso facto a copyright holder), you will probably want to use an expressly vetted, narrowly drafted patent grant. 2. The way the license is worded, it may ask you to do things that you can't do, e.g. if you have the rights to use a patent claim, but not to (sub)license it. (Contrast this with how the Apache license words its patent grant.) 3. It's not clear how broad the patent grant is. It's not inconceivable to read it so that once somebody uses the software, they get an unlimited right to your patent claims, even outside that specific piece of software. 4. You may be waiving your right to use software patents for defensive purposes, too. 5. There's lots of fuzziness in the wording. What are the "usage rights that the author hold on [the software]"? US patent law grants rights to exclude others from making, using, selling, or importing the patented invention; it does not grant a right to exploit the patented invention. (Unlike copyright, which creates an exclusive right for authors to use and distribute the work.) 6. How compatible is the license with other licenses with patent grants?
- jashkenas 9y ago
  Thanks for the list of concerns, it's very much appreciated. If you care enough to open any of them up as an issue on Github, it would be great to discuss them there. But for now, in short: 1. Yes. If you actually own a patent portfolio that you value highly, you may want to use a custom, narrowly worded grant. This license might not be for you. This license is for the 50+% of open source projects currently using MIT. 2. I don't quite follow the problem you're outlining here. The Apache license tries to scope its patent license only to actions that "necessarily infringe" on the Work and the Contributions to it. I'm not sure how you mean for (sub)licensing to fit in. 3. The patent grant is intentionally simpler and broader than, say, Apache. There's no clawback provision, and in short, it gives you: "usage rights to any patents the authors may hold on the software." It doesn't give you the right to use the authors' unrelated patents. The balance here is struck to give more protection and confidence to the user of the open source, not to rigidly protect the potential software patent holder. I think that's the right way to lean. 4. This rhetoric around offensive and defensive uses of software patents is what's keeping Facebook in such hot water with GraphQL and React right now. The only way to use a software patent against someone is offensively — it's a MAD-style threat of legal action. If you want mutually assured patent annihilation, then don't use LIL to release open-source software that uses your patents. It's not a great mix. 5. In US patent law, you can sell your patent, prevent other people from making use of it, or license usage rights to it. The latter is what we're doing in this case. (https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/selling-your-patent-what-you-need-to-know https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/selling-your-patent-what-...) 6. That is a great question. And it would be good to eventually have a wiki page, detailing compatibility with various alternative popular licenses. As a permissive license (more permissive than Apache), my best guess is that it would be generally compatible — but we should look into it further.
joseluisq 9y ago
It looks like a fix to fb license issue... "and including usage rights to any patents the authors may hold on it"

126 points by jashkenas 9y ago

What did your lawyers say?

Obvious XKCD is obvious: https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/ I really admire the goals here, and I read through the FAQ ... but I feel like this just adds to the noise. As much as a respect Jeremy, I'd be a little cautious about using this text written by a non-lawyer.

adrianN 9y ago

Having a nonstandard licence on your code basically ensures that no corporation will use your project. Internal clearing processes become a lot more expensive if it's not one of the approved licences.

fiatjaf 9y ago
Good to know, but for 99% of personal open-source projects on GitHub I think that really shouldn't matter.
whipoodle 9y ago
Indeed, it's a tactic.
jashkenas 9y ago
That may be true, but with that attitude, we'll all still be using MIT in 2047. The hope here is for it to become a standard license in short order, if people find it useful. That includes SPDX submission, OSI approval, and then inclusion in Github's licensing apparatus. Specifically, I'd like to think that corporations would find it significantly more comfortable to use software under LIL than under MIT: They won't have to worry as much about unknown patents held by the authors, and they won't have to worry about future legal disputes with third-party contributors. Both of those are significant issues today — this very week, even. That said, if you want something permissive, but lawyered-up and bulletproof, use Apache. This isn't intended to compete with Apache. It's intended to compete with what folks actually use and love, which is MIT.
nerdponx 9y ago
That's a shame. Kudos to them for trying to improve the MIT license, and for explicitly incorporating a contributor license agreement. However, it would probably behoove them to actually get an actual lawyer to take a look at the license, if only to have some kind of up-front certification for adopters that the thing won't get them sued or taken advantage of. There are several changes from the original MIT language that indicate they might not know what they're doing any more than your average Hackernews. For instance, putting warranty disclaimers in all caps is common practice and it's done for a reason [0], but they evidently didn't bother to search "warranty all caps" on DuckDuckGo and decide "you know what, it's fine, we can live with an all-caps clause." To my untrained eye, it looks fine, but who knows what might cause it to get torn up in court. Which of course proves your point: no corporation will use a LIL licensed project at least until it's been vetted or tested or reviewed somehow. Lil license: Permission is hereby granted by the authors of this software, to any person, to use the software for any purpose, free of charge, including the rights to run, read, copy, change, distribute and sell it, and including usage rights to any patents the authors may hold on it, subject to the following conditions: This license, or a link to its text, must be included with all copies of the software and any derivative works. Any modification to the software submitted to the authors may be incorporated into the software under the terms of this license. The software is provided "as is", without warranty of any kind, including but not limited to the warranties of title, fitness, merchantability and non-infringement. The authors have no obligation to provide support or updates for the software, and may not be held liable for any damages, claims or other liability arising from its use. Expat license: Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE. [0]: http://www.partingthoughts.net/why-are-warranty-disclaimers-in-all-caps/ http://www.partingthoughts.net/why-are-warranty-disclaimers-...
StavrosK 9y ago
Are you really bothered about corporations not being able to use your code? Corporations generally make money from code without paying for it, which ranks them very low on my list of people to cater to with my licenses. I want my licenses to cater to hobbyists/hackers/tinkerers and maybe small businesses first, if corporations don't like it they can pay me to relicense things for them.
- gregmac 9y ago
  When I'm choosing a library to use for a personal project, I do put some consideration if I'm likely and would be able to use it at work. If I end up contributing to the library (and I have), it's nice to be able to use the one with my own contributions in it at work as well.
belorn 9y ago
I have seen many games with license text that says things like "We asked and got permission from the author". You don't get any more nonstandard than emailing some author and getting permission, yet it seems fairly common in even AAA games. So let me theorize why that is. Game studios is always short on time, short on developers, and short on money. If doing something nonstandard will save you days/weeks/months of developer time, that is features and bug fixes that otherwise might never be done. There is no room to be religious about which license the #38 library that you use as long it don't conflict with the business model of developing and selling games. Only industries where competition is slower and there is a disconnect between development and revenue can people care strongly about having only licenses they like.
schindlabua 9y ago
Bit off topic, but is the WTFPL considered a standard licence? If I want to give people the ability to do whatever the fuck they want to with my code, is the WTFPL considered a good choice?
- burntsushi 9y ago
  I used it for a while in a project. Just about everybody was fine with it except for Google. I got several emails from Google employees over the years saying that they could not use it unless I changed the license.
  - raphlinus 9y ago
    This is true, and now there's public documentation that explains a little more of the rationale: https://opensource.google.com/docs/thirdparty/licenses/#wtfpl-not-allowed https://opensource.google.com/docs/thirdparty/licenses/#wtfp...
    - cdelsolar 9y ago
      Is the JSON license allowed?
- ryan_lane 9y ago
  A basic thing to consider about WTFPL is that it's essentially equivalent to public domain, which doesn't exist in some countries, making your software unusable in those countries. Developers seem to love this license because it's cute, short, and uses foul language, but it's a license that no one should use.
yellowapple 9y ago
Plenty of corporations use non-standard licenses, seeing as how pretty much every non-FOSS license out there is non-standard (and in the case of enterprise software, often not even standard across every instance of a given product).

xena 9y ago

Why not CC0?

cpburns2009 9y ago
The Lil license seems to have a patent grant [1]: > Permission is hereby granted by the authors of this software, ... and including usage rights to any patents the authors may hold on it, ... And CC0 does not [2]: > No trademark or patent rights held by Affirmer are waived, abandoned, surrendered, licensed or otherwise affected by this document. That appears to be the motivation of this over other existing, minimal licenses. [1]: http://lillicense.org/v1.html http://lillicense.org/v1.html [2]: https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/133/how-could-using-code-released-under-cc0-infringe-on-the-authors-patents https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/133/how-could...
Flimm 9y ago
Creative Commons advise users against using CC0 for code. CC0 also got caught in a technicality, causing it to never get approved or disapproved as an open source license by the OSI.
- edflsafoiewq 9y ago
  Nevertheless, I've noticed CC0 used by crypto stuff lately (keccak, Argon2).
- insertnickname 9y ago
  CC does not advise against using CC0 for software, only their regular CC licenses. See: https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC0_FAQ#May_I_apply_CC0_to_computer_software.3F_If_so.2C_is_there_a_recommended_implementation.3F https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC0_FAQ#May_I_apply_CC...

maxlybbert 9y ago

I thought the open source community had matured beyond the need for everybody to write their own license.

yellowapple 9y ago
I thought the open source community had matured beyond the need for everybody to use a single one-size-fits-all license in complete ignorance of their actual needs and goals.
- maxlybbert 9y ago
  They grew out of that before they realized there's little value in writing a new license when there are already so many to chose from. I was just starting out when Google Code announced it would only host projects that used an approved license, and Google had a very short list of approved licenses. Sourceforge was more flexible than that, but they still discouraged people from striking out on their own. It took me a while, but I was eventually grateful to Google for being so effective at hitting the brakes. Opensource.org currently lists 83 approved licenses. Fsf.org has a similar list. For a new license to be valuable to me it has to be measurably better than each of those 83 licenses in some way that matters to me. Otherwise it's an annoyance, at best.
- yarrel 9y ago
  Their needs and goals are open source (sic) software. Unsolving this problem would be self-defeating.

jordigh 9y ago

While I appreciate the intent, patents are complicated, and the reason more complicated and weak licenses like the Apache license version 2 exist are precisely to address the complexity of patents. Software nerds don't like complicated licenses just because they're not lawyers, but legal complexity is inherent in human affairs and cannot be simplified too much. The shortest license isn't necessarily the most desirable one. Writing a new license just because the Apache license is tl;dr is just not a good idea. Saying that you'll just ignore the law because you disagree with it will actually probably work out for a while until you're big enough for the law to no longer ignore you in return. We've had amateur licenses written many times before. GPLv1 and the first Perl license are examples. They both had to be rewritten once someone who actually knows law looked them over. In other words, kids, don't try this at home. There are professionals who can do this for you.

jashkenas 9y ago
Totally. And if it's a terrible idea, then it will die a quiet death, and that will be fine. But there's a little more here than just "don't try this at home." The Apache license is a wonderful license. If you want to use it, you absolutely should use it. But people don't use it. They prefer to use something they can understand, something that doesn't have to be interpreted by a legal team, and something that they can feel comfortable imposing on the users of their code. According to a 2015 survey conducted by Github, MIT and BSD simple licenses are nearly five times more often used than Apache. Out of the top ten most starred open source projects, nine of them use MIT/BSD, and only one uses Apache. Clearly, there's a desire — in the actual practice of sharing open source — for something that explains your legal and social obligations in as plain an English as we can muster, while still being crystal clear in legal terms.
- jordigh 9y ago
  I'm pretty sure that's because Github encouraged, and to some extent still does, for people to completely ignore licenses. This attitude spreads and explains why people want the least amount of license posible. The solution isn't to make licenses more "user-friendly". That user friendliness can be a dangerous illusion. The solution is to not forget the legal lessons that we already lived back before free software was renamed to open source in 1998.

jstimpfle 9y ago

I've had the impression lately that people are overly scared of licenses. Like, on the level that a forgotten dot or so at the end could completely change the meaning as seen by jurisdiction. IANAL, but I don't feel that's the case. I'm actually pretty sure you could just put "You're free to use this software for whatever you want" in a somewhat obvious central location, and your users would be good. The obvious intent counts. The BSD licenses don't seem to do more (besides adding a few restrictions for the user). WTFPL is another good example license. I haven't really heard that it's a bad or jurisdictionally "invalid" license. (But sure, for "big" stuff I guess the comment by adrianN applies).

nerdponx 9y ago
AFAIK there are certain rights that copyright holders can't actually waive in certain jurisdictions.
- jstimpfle 9y ago
  Yes, I have heard that the term "public domain" doesn't exist in some places and that might technically mean no rights are granted to the user at all, or something along these lines. And for that reason, some projects have some kind of dual-license ("this code is in the public domain, or totally free in case there is no such concept in your country"). But again I feel like that's acting and being scared without any evidence. (And it seems really silly to me that an author would actually have to adopt to the country of the user). There is very little official statements to find on the internet. All I've ever heard about is these big corporations taking nasty fights, and that seems to scare people with their little tinker projects to death. Realistically, I would be surprised if e.g. the MIT license was actually more user-friendly than the WTFPL. I'd love to hear about these thoughts from actual lawyers!
  - slfront 9y ago
    I AM NOT A LAWYER. THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE. The problems with public domain dedication across jurisdictional lines, as I understand them, are: 1. Users (who are aware of how the law works, in general terms) in a country that doesn't recognize a right to relinquish copyright to the public domain will be afraid of getting sued, so they won't use the software. It might as well not be open source for them. 2. Contributors to your public domain software from those countries are not allowed to relinquish copyright in their works to the public domain, and as a result you're actually accepting work under copyright into your otherwise-public-domain software, which means it's not really public domain software any longer, because of mutual copyright observance agreements between those countries. Thus, for instance, because the US recognizes German copyrights, and Germany doesn't allow dedication of copyrightable works to the public domain, a German contributing code to a public domain work in the US actually contaminates the public domain work with code covered by copyright, thus making it no longer a (pure) public domain work, even in the US, because of US recognition of German copyrights. If the German in the above example actually transfers the copyright to you, then YOU dedicate the work to the public domain, that might work. I'm just guessing, though, and I'm pretty sure it would require some explicit legally binding (and provable) statements about transferring copyright to you.

dmm 9y ago

Please just use the ISC license. It's a permissive license that is as short as modern law allows. It's well understood and accepted. It's the default license for node.js packages and the preferred license for OpenBSD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISC_license https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISC_license Here it is in it's entirety: Copyright <YEAR> <OWNER> Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies. THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND THE AUTHOR DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES WITH REGARD TO THIS SOFTWARE INCLUDING ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR BE LIABLE FOR ANY SPECIAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM LOSS OF USE, DATA OR PROFITS, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, NEGLIGENCE OR OTHER TORTIOUS ACTION, ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE USE OR PERFORMANCE OF THIS SOFTWARE.

nerdponx 9y ago
ISC, like MIT/Expat, lacks a contributor license agreement. Is it implied that any contribution to an ISC-licensed (or MIT-licensed) project is granted to the original author?
- gras 9y ago
  Of course not, licenses are for granting rights to use copyrighted works, not for transfering copyright. I also don't see why open source contributors should give away the copyright to their work. All it accomplishes, is that the "original author" (= the copyright holder, usually a company) can re-license the work without agreement from all contributors. It strips contributors from parts of their rights.
  - nerdponx 9y ago
    So if I fix a piece of buggy open-source code and my patch is merged, then I "own" the bug fix and the author no longer owns that portion of the program? Is that really what you're proposing? It makes sense in the case where I contribute, say, an entire new module. Then I should have the right to do with it as I please. But there needs to be a line drawn somewhere, and I sure as hell couldn't tell you where.

beefhash 9y ago

A tech project or project that is related to tech that does not have its primary domain serving HTTPS? It's hosted on GitHub Pages. Every single time.

amattn 9y ago

The contributor statement is new to me and definitely the highlight of this license: > Any modification to the software submitted to the authors may be incorporated into the software under the terms of this license. I'd love something like this become a little more common. Making contributors sign paperwork is a tremendous hassle. Hopefully the OSI (https://opensource.org/licenses https://opensource.org/licenses) will take a crack at this one soon. If it shows up on their list, I can see adoption ramping up.

0xbear 9y ago

Just use Apache 2.0. Don’t invent new licenses, there are way too many already. Unless your project offers something extraordinary, a custom license not written by an IP lawyer == no use of your code in any project where lawyers have to review the licensing.

jashkenas 9y ago

Friends, I totally get the initial instinct to think "Aieeee! Not another amateur open source software license! Those things breed like flies!" But if you wouldn't mind taking two minutes to read the text of the license before giving in to that feeling — I think you'll find that it might put you more at ease than what you're currently using — if you're using MIT. Like MIT and ISC, it's short and sweet and comprehensible, and like Apache it tries to establish common standards around potential patent use and contributions back to the codebase. It hits a sweet spot that, for me, doesn't exist in anything currently on the OSI's long list of licenses. I did run it by a couple of lawyers and a couple of open source developers before publishing it this morning. But I don't believe that review should matter too much to you: An OSS license is an agreement between the author and the user of the software. If they can both easily understand it to mean the same thing, then we can feel that we're on solid ground. That's why we use MIT today.

tptacek 9y ago
Unfortunately, I've been conditioned by the scary stories 'DannyBee tells here to worry about new license language that doesn't come directly from lawyers. It sounds like you've actually had lawyers look at it. A blurb anywhere on this page indicating that it's been vetted this would be pretty powerful!
- jashkenas 9y ago
  It may be pretty powerful, but I'm uncomfortable believing that it really should be. For starters, every lawyer has a different opinion, a different style of preferred phrasing, and a different understanding of what open source software is. Ultimately the parties involved are you, your users and your contributors. Most of us don't have lawyers. That said, I think it might be effective to put some short legal opinions, from experts in this particular field, into the FAQ. If anyone's listening: that would make for a great pull request. The goal here is to make this thing as shipshape, watertight and bulletproof as possible, while remaining "simpler than MIT". Then it becomes the license I would have always wanted to use.
  - 9y ago

jwilk 9y ago

Don't roll your own crypto, er, I mean legal.

102030485868 9y ago

"distribute and sell": but what if I just want to distribute? Oxford commas are important. See: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/16/us/oxford-comma-lawsuit.html?mcubz=0 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/16/us/oxford-comma-lawsuit.h...

jstimpfle 9y ago
This is not a situation where Oxford commas are needed to disambiguate. The way you see it, I think an Oxford comma would force you to do even more things at the same time. But that's silly; this statement is granting you rights, and it's your choice on whether you want to exercise them or not. If some rights can be exercised only conditionally, the text needs to make that clear.

amelius 9y ago

> Permission is hereby granted by the authors of this software, (...) and including usage rights to any patents the authors may hold on it, (...) But what if the source code is modified? Will the users still get the usage right of the patents? And what if the source code is modified so much that the original code is barely recognizable? It seems to me that using this license means you're giving away your patents for free.

belorn 9y ago
> original code is barely recognizable Will the original authors still have copyright over it? If yes: Then clearly in the mind of the law the original work is still present. If no: Then the license choice of the original authors is not longer relevant.
- amelius 9y ago
  Let me rephrase: users could use the software only to gain free access to the patents. Thus this license is like giving away access to the patents.
  - jashkenas 9y ago
    The intent is to provide users of the software with full confidence that by using the software, they will not be held liable for infringing on the patents that the authors of and contributors to the software might hold on the software. Other licenses, like Apache, include patent grant withdrawal clauses, where you can lose the right to use the patent if you initiate a lawsuit. The notorious Facebook BSD+PATENTS license includes a similar withdrawal of patent grant, but for any Facebook patent, not just something related to the software in question, and also only if you sue Facebook or a subsidiary — the Apache withdrawal applies to "any entity". Here, there are no withdrawal provisions, hopefully giving you that full confidence as a user. As an author, if you have a patent on something, and then you release an open source project under LIL that uses that patent, you give up the right to sue anyone for infringing on your patent by using your open source project, period. I think that's more in the spirit of open source.

Flimm 9y ago

> Check out License Zero. It helps open source software stay free for use and modification for non-commercial purposes, while commercial users can be required to pay after a trial period. I would delete the words "open source" from this sentence. License Zero is not an open source license, as open source licenses cannot discriminate against commercial uses. See the Open Source Definition by the OSI.

jashkenas 9y ago
Thanks for the correction. I've made the change in the FAQ to not describe License Zero as an open source license. On its own website, it's very careful not to.
- ZenoArrow 9y ago
  Open source or not, thank you for bringing it to my attention, I can see some potential benefits of Licence Zero, especially for larger projects where funding is more important. The Lil licence looks promising too.
  - kemitchell 9y ago
    Thank you both for your interest! For completeness: The original License Zero Public License, now dubbed the License Zero Noncommercial Public License (L0-NC), is admittedly _not_ an Open Source license per OSI's definition. There is now also a draft, alternative public license for L0 projects, The License Zero Reciprocal Public License (L0-R). It's a hair-trigger copyleft-style license, built in much the same way, from a BSD-2-Clause base: https://github.com/licensezero/licensezero-reciprocal-public-license/blob/master/LICENSE.mustache https://github.com/licensezero/licensezero-reciprocal-public... More here: https://medium.com/licensezero/a-hacker-public-license-d28053038b45 https://medium.com/licensezero/a-hacker-public-license-d2805... I believe L0-R _is_ an Open Source license, and have submitted to OSI for approval. I also believe it will be as, if not more effective than L0-NC in driving industrial users to purchase private licenses.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

nobodyorother 9y ago

Please stop making new licenses. You do not need a new license, you need to understand how to use the existing ones and how they interact with one another. The number of license interactions you need to mange on any project is the factorial of the number of licenses in the project. With even just 4 licenses (pretty easy when you're just trying to make it work), that's 24 sets of interactions. Just wait till you get to 7 licenses.

akerro 9y ago

Is this the opposite of react native license?

andrepd 9y ago

Gray on gray text... Just why?

YorickPeterse 9y ago

> Permission is hereby granted by the authors of this software, to any person Person as in what, a natural person? What about non persons such as legal entities? > and including usage rights to any patents the authors may hold on it So the license allows you to use any patents (held by the project author) included in the project, but it doesn't cover anything about patents used by contributors when submitting changes. OK... > Any modification to the software submitted to the authors may be incorporated into the software > under the terms of this license. May? That seems like something that should really be changed to "Any modification to the software submitted [...] will be incorporated into [...]" or something similar that _doesn't_ let people decide about this on the fly. This license as a whole is rather vague, leaving a lot up to interpretation. This isn't something you want from the only thing that stands between you and a potential legal nightmare. Just use good existing licenses such as the MPL 2.0, Apache, GPL (or some flavour of it), or even the MIT license (though I would strongly recommend not using it without a CLA).

jashkenas 9y ago
> Person as in what, a natural person? Person as in a legal person. This includes entities like corporations, organizations, representatives and so on: http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/person http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/person > but it doesn't cover anything about patents used by contributors... It tries to. Any change contributed to the project grants permission to incorporate that change under the same terms of the license, which includes the patent grant. This is how people generally tend to behave with open source. > May? That [...] should really be changed to [...] will I also considered "will" and "shall" and "grants permission to" and a few other options, but "may" fits most precisely and succinctly. Submitted contributions aren't necessarily going to be merged into the project, but they may be, and if they are, the act of submission back to the project grants permission to incorporate them under the same terms of the license. http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/may http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/may
- YorickPeterse 9y ago
  > Person as in a legal person. This includes entities like corporations, > organizations, representatives and so on: > http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/person This may be the case for US law ("person" including both individuals and organisations), but it might also not be the case for all countries across the world. For example, Dutch law seems to define "person" as the individual (e.g. you and me) and seems to use a separate term for legal entities and the likes. It's possible that in practise the two are considered the same but I haven't been able to find such an example. Exactly because of this it's better to be explicit. For example, the MPL 2.0 explicitly defines this: > 1.1. "Contributor" > > means each individual or legal entity that creates, contributes to the > creation of, or owns Covered Software. Here the term "contributor" is used, but the same could apply to the term "person". > It tries to. Any change contributed to the project grants permission to > incorporate that change under the same terms of the license, which > includes the patent grant. The patent grant states that any patents owned by the author can be used by the software's users: > and including usage rights to any patents the authors may hold on it However, nowhere is it stated that patents used for contributions automatically belong (or can be used by) the authors and can thus also be used by the users. Defining what "authors" means could clear things up, though you'll probably want to separate the definition from "contributors" since you probably don't want random "contributors" to also be an "author" (this could give them too much power for example). Again the MPL 2.0 is a good example since it does cover this, albeit not in a single place and in a somewhat hard to grok way.

slfront 9y ago

Try the COIL instead, if the main reason for this license is a patent clause. http://copyfree.org/content/standard/licenses/coil/license.txt http://copyfree.org/content/standard/licenses/coil/license.t... edit: Please stop advertising for AL2. It's not as good a license as people think. It contains some fiddly terms that many people don't even know are there, or don't understand, and is distressingly easy for people to casually violate by accident. Its complexity adds to the problem as well, by offering many opportunities for unintended legal effects in (so far hypothetical) future lawsuits to arise from interactions between parts of the license, a problem with any long license, and AL2 has severe license incompatibility issues as well.

JamesFM 9y ago
I've never heard of this license before. Has it been vetted the OSI or the FSF? Also what specifically is bad about the Apache 2 license?
- slfront 9y ago
  I AM NOT A LAWYER. THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE. It is not certified by either FSF or OSI. The process of getting it evaluated by the OSI and certified involves a lot of money, unless it is such a popular license that the OSI is politically backed into a corner about it. The FSF's politics around such things get downright strange; I'm not even sure what it would take for the FSF to consider a non-GNU license. AL2 contains restrictions such as a requirement to perform bookkeeping when making changes (notes for every modified file about who changed it) and restrictions against changing another file. The bookkeeping restriction is violated with stunning regularity; so far, nobody has been sued over it, as far as I know, but that's true of the majority of license violations anyway. AL2 also, as I mentioned, has some serious license incompatibility problems. Some patent and indemnification material in AL2 is considered incompatible with GNU licenses prior to v3, for instance. In fact, any license that includes a restriction against any connected work being "more restrictive" in some way (which includes GNU licenses, among others) is likely to suffer some significant compatibility issues with any license that has weird quirks like the previously mentioned issues of AL2 (bookkeeping, invariant file), too. The patent termination part of AL2 is unlikely to cause incompatibility with most licenses (GNU licenses are weird, in that regard) unless they come with a restriction on "restrictions" and have a less restrictive patent clause than AL2 (no patent termination, for instance), but the edge cases in AL2 can cause issues with other licenses. I'm not a lawyer (and this is not legal advice), but I think a case could be made in court that AL2 and GPLv3 are actually not compatible at all, because of those clauses, despite what ASF and FSF say. Beyond that, there's just the simple fact of complexity. You've probably heard that software tends toward X bugs per Y lines of code, and that's true for the most straightforward, linear software designs. As the complexity of the design of the software increases, though, the possible unexpected interactions between parts of it increases as well. The result is that, in practical terms, the likelihood of bugs actually increases faster than the number of lines of code. The same effect occurs with legal licensing terms, to some degree; the more complex a software license, the more likely you are to run afoul of unexpected legal effects of the license. AL2 is a rather complex license, much simpler than GPLv3, but significantly more complicated than something like the COIL, especially given the inclusion of the terms I mentioned earlier, which are radical departures from the most widely-used, best-understood "state of the art" of license design.

rbehrends 9y ago

Hmm. As I understand, the primary purpose here is to have a permissive license with a patent grant. Some problems I see: 1. If you're actually have patent claims to your name (a minority of people, while every author is ipso facto a copyright holder), you will probably want to use an expressly vetted, narrowly drafted patent grant. 2. The way the license is worded, it may ask you to do things that you can't do, e.g. if you have the rights to use a patent claim, but not to (sub)license it. (Contrast this with how the Apache license words its patent grant.) 3. It's not clear how broad the patent grant is. It's not inconceivable to read it so that once somebody uses the software, they get an unlimited right to your patent claims, even outside that specific piece of software. 4. You may be waiving your right to use software patents for defensive purposes, too. 5. There's lots of fuzziness in the wording. What are the "usage rights that the author hold on [the software]"? US patent law grants rights to exclude others from making, using, selling, or importing the patented invention; it does not grant a right to exploit the patented invention. (Unlike copyright, which creates an exclusive right for authors to use and distribute the work.) 6. How compatible is the license with other licenses with patent grants?

jashkenas 9y ago
Thanks for the list of concerns, it's very much appreciated. If you care enough to open any of them up as an issue on Github, it would be great to discuss them there. But for now, in short: 1. Yes. If you actually own a patent portfolio that you value highly, you may want to use a custom, narrowly worded grant. This license might not be for you. This license is for the 50+% of open source projects currently using MIT. 2. I don't quite follow the problem you're outlining here. The Apache license tries to scope its patent license only to actions that "necessarily infringe" on the Work and the Contributions to it. I'm not sure how you mean for (sub)licensing to fit in. 3. The patent grant is intentionally simpler and broader than, say, Apache. There's no clawback provision, and in short, it gives you: "usage rights to any patents the authors may hold on the software." It doesn't give you the right to use the authors' unrelated patents. The balance here is struck to give more protection and confidence to the user of the open source, not to rigidly protect the potential software patent holder. I think that's the right way to lean. 4. This rhetoric around offensive and defensive uses of software patents is what's keeping Facebook in such hot water with GraphQL and React right now. The only way to use a software patent against someone is offensively — it's a MAD-style threat of legal action. If you want mutually assured patent annihilation, then don't use LIL to release open-source software that uses your patents. It's not a great mix. 5. In US patent law, you can sell your patent, prevent other people from making use of it, or license usage rights to it. The latter is what we're doing in this case. (https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/selling-your-patent-what-you-need-to-know https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/selling-your-patent-what-...) 6. That is a great question. And it would be good to eventually have a wiki page, detailing compatibility with various alternative popular licenses. As a permissive license (more permissive than Apache), my best guess is that it would be generally compatible — but we should look into it further.

joseluisq 9y ago

It looks like a fix to fb license issue... "and including usage rights to any patents the authors may hold on it"