I Am Not A Lawyer, but what immediately jumped out at me is how the patent
grants seem *very* different between BOML and permissive-next.
BOML states merely:
Each contributor licenses you to do everything with this software that
would otherwise infringe any patent claims they can license or become
able
to license.
permissive-next by contrast states:
1. Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, I grant You:
...
b. A non-exclusive, worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free, irrevocable patent
license under Licensed Patents to make, have made, use, sell, offer for
sale, and import Covered Works.
"Licensed Patents" means all patent claims licensable royalty-free by Me,
now or in the future, that are necessarily infringed by making,
using, or
selling My Work, and excludes claims that would be infringed only as a
consequence of further modification of My Work.
"Covered Work" means My Work or a derivative work of My Work.
Your license grants under section 1 are automatically terminated if You
initiate a patent infringement litigation claim (excluding
declaratory
judgment actions, counterclaims, and cross-claims) alleging that any part
of My Work directly or indirectly infringes any patent.
Termination of Your license grants extends to all copies of Covered Works
You subsequently obtain. Termination does not terminate the rights of
those
who have received copies or rights from You subject to this License.
To the extent permission to make copies of a Covered Work is necessary
merely for running it, such permission is not terminable.
As far as I understand it, then, BOML's patent grant gives licensees (be
they users or creators of derivative works) patent licenses, in fact even
more broadly than permissive-next if I'm reading that right? I'm not
entirely sure *how* broad the scope of the BOML grant is; "can license *or
become able to license*" [emphasis mine] sounds like it could have
theoretically unlimited scope!
By contrast permissive-next:
- Grants fewer but IMHO far clearer granting of patent rights; notably
it draws a boundary at any additions to the work, only covering the work as
provided by "the individual or legal entity that places" the work under
permissive-next.
- In other words, at least as I understand it if Entity A owns
patents 1 and 2, and the work as provided to the public under
permissive-next includes stuff that would fall under patent 1, Entity B
could take that work and be confident they would not be infringing patent
1, but if Entity B adds functionality that would infringe patent 2 the
patent grant would *not* then apply to patent 2.
- It seems to me that in this scenario if the work was under BOML
this might be quite different, and patent 2 would in fact be
covered under
the patent grant, which while arguably positive from a "software patents,
they're bad!" perspective, is oddly viral (so to speak) for a permissive
license, and seems like a pretty big blank cheque to write.
- Terminates your patent license grants if you initiate patent
infringement litigation against the entity you got those grants from via
the software license.
- So, if Entity B owned patent 3 and figured Entity A was infringing
on it with The Work, if they then sued Entity A over this (perhaps as
retaliation for having been sued over infringing patent 2) they
would lose
their license for patent 1 for their Derived Work. No such termination
would take place under BOML.
I could be really misreading this all; as aforementioned, IANAL! But it
sure seems to me that permissive-next and BOML are *very* different
licenses in terms of just the patent grant portion alone. And as the patent
grant portion is a core part of copyleft-next, it would make no sense for
copyleft-next to sunset into BOML.
And in addition, as aforementioned, I find the wording in BOML very unclear
and ambiguously broad, which is a serious problem when you're trying to
convince people to use a new license. To editorialize a bit more, one of
the big upsides and selling points of copyleft-next is that it tries to be
legally comprehensive while still being easily readable by baseline
humanity; BOML by contrast seems to err far more on the side of brevity,
arguably to the detriment of clarity.