Patent grant for MIT-style based FSL

[siemato]

I was mulling over the patent section of the license. As far as I can tell, Patents aren't a thing of consideration for MIT, the BSDs have their own variant BSD-2-Clause-Patent, and there's the UPL-1.0 as a ground-up license in the spirits of MIT with patents. Under this premise, I am suggesting an extension of the FSL for this use-case, since patents remain a core building block in rights management in many legal frameworks for a plethora of markets.

Can you clarify what's needed for an extension of the FSL? While MIT+Apache covers most use cases, there's still non-attribution (Zero-clause BSD - 0BSD) and marketing restrictions (BSD-3-clause) without representation and both are quite fundamental to either the ecosystem as licensing for core/std libs or for protecting brands and brand value (and thus are again in the spirits of the FSL).

Thank you for your time and consideration.

[chadwhitacre]

Thanks for weighing in, @siemato @Brian-M-J! :-)

Can you clarify what's needed for an extension of the FSL?

On one interpretation of your question, an extension of FSL would be a new license with a different name. On another, if you are asking to modify the FSL itself such that we would release a 1.2 or 2.0 version, or a variant using a different future license (I think this is what you mean?), you have to make a convincing case. :)

this use-case

Sorry, I'm lost ... what's the use case? If I understand correctly that you're asking for FSL with, e.g., a UPL future license, what's the rationale since Apache 2.0 already includes a patent clause?

[siemato]

Thank you for your time, @chadwhitacre

Sorry, I'm lost ... what's the use case? If I understand correctly that you're asking for FSL with, e.g., a UPL future license, what's the rationale since Apache 2.0 already includes a patent clause?

Outside of personal taste, I'm primarily concerned about the incompatibility between Apache 2.0 and GPLv2, AGPLv3 and probably others that i'm not considering right now.

I'm more in favor of terse licenses for accessibility reasons. MIT/UPL/BSD-2/3 is just a lot easier to understand, but that's not a concern of functional applicability and personal opinion instead.

[chadwhitacre]

It's tricky. As a new license FSL is interesting to those like yourselves who are clearly knowledgeable about licensing details. At the same time, our goal with FSL is to be accessible to the vast majority of people who are not licensing geeks. :) We chose MIT and Apache 2.0 as the only two change/future licenses for FSL because they are extremely widely adopted, covering like 99%+ of the permissive OSS out there. We would want to see similar extremely wide adoption from UPL in order to consider adding a third variant of FSL.

I'm going to close this out for now. If someone thinks there is a case to be made based on license popularity, we can perhaps revisit.

Thank you for chiming in! Sorry for the dead end. 🙏

[siemato]

@chadwhitacre I opened this to draw attention to the patent issue, and I consider that successful. I was unsure, how you're positioning yourself to begin with, and i think this can serve as a reference of what options are out there, in case it ever comes up. Again, thank you for your time and feel free to @ me if the topic ever comes up.

[chadwhitacre]

Agreed. Good to have this on record. Thanks for opening this thread! :-)