Thursday, July 30, 2009

Education Community License

While looking at Ivanhoe, I discovered the Educational Community License, an OSI-approved open source license designed to address common concerns of academic projects, specifically:

Notice of any changes or modifications to the Original Work, including the date the changes were made.

Any modifications of the Original Work must be distributed in such a manner as to avoid any confusion with the Original Work of the copyright holders...

The name and trademarks of copyright holder(s) may NOT be used in advertising or publicity pertaining to the Original or Derivative Works without specific, written prior permission.

Otherwise it is a pretty run of the mill permissive license.

There are lots of projects like Ivanhoe that demonstrate that while open source licensing of academic research is unlikely to lead to an amazing flowering of community contributions, there are essentially no examples of abuse or negative consequences from the open source licensing of software created by academic research.

If you've got any examples, I'm all ears.

No comments: