Re: apache license 2.0: having trouble getting our university licensing office to like it, your thoughts?

[Garrett Rooney <ro...@electricjellyfish.net>]

On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 9:42 PM, John Owens<jo...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Howdy, I'm a professor at an unnamed campus of the University of
> California and lead an open-source project. The project is currently
> licensed under a modified BSD license (that has a couple of extra
> clauses from plain BSD). We would like to move the project to Google
> Code and use Apache 2.0 to license it there (our industrial
> collaborator prefers Apache 2.0). Our licensing office at my campus
> does not like Apache (but would allow us to use BSD or another license
> that does not have the patent clause) and I was hoping to get your
> guidance / advice / thoughts on the difficulty I'm having.
>
> The specific problem that our office has is the patent clause. The
> difficulty appears to be that our office does not like "giving away"
> the patent rights of its inventors. We were discussing both the GPL3
> and Apache which have similar patent clauses and an attorney from our
> office said: "I believe the GPL potentially violates the UC Patent
> Policy (both the programmers and those who distribute), and the UCOP
> legal folks that I've been able to get to think about it think they
> agree, though no one has asked them for a formal legal opinion because
> no one has been determined to use it."
>
> The difficulty appears to be that licensing something under Apache
> requires giving a patent license (I believe this is accurate; we'd be
> licensing any patents we have in the work to anyone who uses our
> work), and our attorney is concerned about this; that it is unfair to
> the inventors to "give away" their patent rights.
>
> I would love to hear the thoughts of the list on this, and in
> particular if other universities have faced this question and have
> thoughts on their use of Apache. Any help you could offer would be
> really appreciated.

Just my personal opinion, but if you're not willing to give people
rights to the patents embodied by your source code, then why the hell
would you bother giving them the code in the first place?  They can't
use it without licensing your patents anyway, so it might as well not
be open source at all.

-garrett

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