{"id":"MulanPSL-2.0","title":"Mulan Permissive Software License, Version 2","reviewed_on":"2026-09-15","reviewer":"Giray Havur","text_source":"https://raw.githubusercontent.com/spdx/license-list-data/main/text/MulanPSL-2.0.txt","text_retrieved":true,"verdict":"created","summary":"The record models version 2 of the Mulan Permissive Software License, published in Chinese and English with the Chinese version prevailing. It grants a perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, irrevocable copyright license and a matching patent license, grants no trademark license, and requires every redistribution to carry a copy of the license and to retain the copyright, patent, trademark and disclaimer statements. A patent action against the software ends the patent license.","findings":[{"rubric":3,"severity":"major","field":"odrl:permission","description":"The copyright grant reads: \"each Contributor hereby grants to you a perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, use, modify, or distribute its Contribution, with modification or not.\" The record permits reproduce, distribute, modify, derive, display, present, commercial use, derivative works, modified works and the distribution fee. The patent section grants a patent license expressly, so dalicc:patentGrant is a permission.","action":"applied"},{"rubric":5,"severity":"major","field":"odrl:duty","description":"The distribution restriction reads: \"You may distribute the Software in any medium with or without modification, whether in source or executable forms, provided that you provide recipients with a copy of this License and retain copyright, patent, trademark and disclaimer statements in the Software.\" cc:Attribution and cc:Notice on distribute, modify and derive.","action":"applied"},{"rubric":4,"severity":"major","field":"odrl:prohibition","description":"The patent section continues: \"If you or your Affiliates directly or indirectly institute patent litigation (including a cross claim or counterclaim in a litigation) or other patent enforcement activities against any individual or entity by alleging that the Software or any Contribution in it infringes patents, then any patent license granted to you under this License for the Software shall terminate as of the date such litigation or activity is filed or taken.\" dalicc:patentRetaliationTermination is modelled as a prohibition, the reading the review gave the term: the licensee may not sue and keep the grant. The clause is quoted in dalicc:additionalClauses so the mechanism stays readable.","action":"applied"},{"rubric":4,"severity":"major","field":"odrl:prohibition","description":"The trademark section reads: \"No trademark license is granted to use the trade names, trademarks, service marks, or product names of Contributor, except as required to fulfill notice requirements in section 4.\" That is dalicc:promote as a prohibition, the way the library expresses a no-trademark clause. dalicc:ChangeLicense is prohibited because the text requires the license itself to travel with every copy, which is the reading IscLicense and BSD-3-Clause take of the same clause. The MIT record does not carry the prohibition although its text has the same requirement, so the library is not uniform here. (Corrected on 2026-09-15 by the verification of this review group: see the rubric 3 finding on relicensing below.)","action":"applied"},{"rubric":6,"severity":"minor","field":"dalicc:WarrantyDisclaimer","description":"Section 5 carries the warranty disclaimer and the liability limitation in one paragraph; each sentence is quoted into its own field. The typographic apostrophe in the liability sentence is the one in the published text.","action":"applied"},{"rubric":7,"severity":"major","field":"cc:jurisdiction","description":"The license is published in Chinese and English, and section 6 says that in case of divergence the Chinese version prevails. cc:jurisdiction stays dalicc:worldwide, because the grant itself is expressly worldwide and no legal system is chosen for it, and the language clause is quoted in dalicc:additionalClauses. The record quotes the English text, which the license declares to have the same legal effect.","action":"applied"},{"rubric":2,"severity":"info","field":"odrl:target","description":"One odrl:AssetCollection of dct:type dcmitype:Software, following MIT. The text licenses a program and its related documents.","action":"applied"},{"rubric":9,"severity":"info","field":"record","description":"The consistency check with the axioms of dg_default returned no conflicts.","action":"none"},{"rubric":10,"severity":"info","field":"record","description":"The closest existing record is Apache-2.0, which has the same three elements: a copyright grant, an express patent grant with retaliation, and a no-trademark clause. Mulan PSL v2 is much shorter and has no notice file and no state-changes duty.","action":"none"},{"rubric":3,"severity":"major","field":"odrl:permission","description":"Library convention 15: a licence that asks for no reciprocity and no source code asks only that the notice travels with the copy, which is a duty on the acts it governs and not a bar on putting the copy under other terms. dalicc:ChangeLicense is therefore a permission here, and the prohibition the earlier reading wrote is removed. The text reads: \"Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Contributor hereby grants to you a perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, use, modify, or distribute its Contribution, with modification or not.\" The permission carries the dalicc:compliantLicense duty, as Apache-2.0 does, because the notice has to survive the relicensing.","action":"applied"}],"family":"Permissive: MIT, ISC and BSD-like","port_of":null,"variant_kind":null,"notes":"Modelled from the English text published by the licensor at license.coscl.org.cn, which the SPDX plain text carries alongside the Chinese original. Section 6 makes the Chinese version the one that prevails, so the quoted English clauses are a translation of the operative text and should be read with that in mind."}