Educational Community License

bwheeler — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 13:51:52 -0600

It seems obvious that colleges and universities might wish share software that they write -- especially with other institutions of higher education. The cost of sharing a digital work product is near zero, but other matters around rights, patents, warranties, etc. often complicate this to the point of impeading otherwise good-willed cooperation.

In October of 2006, a group of about 30 university attorneys, technology transfer officers, project leaders, foundations, and others gathered to discuss a Framework for Software Sharing for Higher Education. There were no simple answers that met all needs. Calls to "just use the BSD or the Apache license" solved one problem but created others. The final work product, Guidelines and Report of the Licensing and Policy Framework Summit for Software Sharing in Higher Education contains much of the discussion regarding tradeoffs and the decision to created the Educational Community License 2.0 (ECL). ECL is best used in conjunction with an "inbound" Contributor Agreement (see guidelines above for details).

ECL 2.0 received approval from the Open Source Initiative in Summer of 2007. It is essentially the Apache 2.0 license with a modification of the patent language to make it workable for many colleges and universities.

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Created by bwheeler on 2008/01/03 - 12:51pm.
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