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Mulan PSL

Programming På svenska → Updated: 2026-11-01

China's home-grown permissive license, with Chinese and English texts of equal legal weight.

The Mulan Permissive Software License appeared in 2019, and version 2 followed in early 2020; that same year it became the first Chinese license approved by the OSI. In substance it sits close to Apache License 2.0: free use and redistribution, an explicit patent grant from every contributor, and termination of that grant for anyone who sues over patents in the work. It is shorter, and drops Apache's NOTICE file requirement.

The unusual part is the language clause. The Chinese and English versions are equally authoritative, and where they conflict the Chinese one wins. The point was to give Chinese companies a license their own courts could read without a translator. Huawei's openEuler and openGauss use it, which makes it far more widespread than most national licenses ever get.

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