Comment by YorickPeterse | Hacker News Reader

Comment by YorickPeterse | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

    > 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).

  > 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

  > 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

    > 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.

Right — I think this is the central point I'm trying to make:

If you want a license where every noun in the license is rigorously defined at the top, where every possible use of the software is spelled out explicitly, and where every eventuality is considered in advance, then the Lil License isn't for you. It's not supposed to be. We already have Apache 2.0 and MPL 2.0 for that, and they're great. Use 'em.

Instead, the goal here is to cover the bases we know we need to cover in 2017 (contributions and patents), while remaining as simple as or simpler than MIT — which is the license that everyone actually uses. It's a different goal.

So Lil is basically either

MIT + Patents Grant

or

Apache 2.0 but much simplified in wording and length.

Am i correct in the grand overview?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com