Carlo Piana, a law attorney specialising in the Open Source Software (OSS) practice he calls “Free Software”, submits a proposal for an “MXM Public Licence” to the Open Source Initiative (OSI) on behalf of Leonardo. The proposal basically extends the provisions of the Mozilla Public Licence (MPL 1.1) where (legal concepts expressed by a non-legal person) the originator of the code releases the copyright of the code, the patents that are relevant to exercise the code that he may hold, but not the patents that he does not hold.
The proposed MXM licence, including text that the originator does not release the patents he holds that are required to exercise the code, angers some OSS integralists.
Humble observations of a non-legal person:
- What about the BSD and MIT licences? Don’t they achieve the same purpose of releasing just the copyright of the code? Are they not OSS licences?
- Imagine there is an individual releasing code under MPL 1.1 that requires patents of a 3rd party with which he may have all sorts of business relationships.