ECL 2.0 and New Questions!

Tzeng, Nigel H. Nigel.Tzeng at jhuapl.edu
Thu Nov 22 11:43:20 UTC 2007


>I would suggest that the Software Freedom Law Center would be better able to help you than we are :-)

Actually, the comments were exactly what I was looking for since Matthew pointed me toward ECL v2.0. :)

The ECL 2.0 Patent License modification is exactly what I was looking for.

"Any patent license granted hereby with respect to contributions by an individual employed by an institution or organization is limited to patent claims where the individual that is the author of the Work is also the inventor of the patent claims licensed, and where the organization or institution has the right to grant such license under applicable grant and research funding agreements."

I have a few objectives:

1) I wish to show that competitors cannot gain an advantage because we released some of our software as open source.  A reciprocal license does this for me since the portions we contribute remains in the commons and everyone shares in any improvements.

2) I wish to show that an open source contribution by one contributor in our institution does not accidently convey IP that some other researcher is inventing.  Given we have a year to file it may or may not be possible to know what is or is not in the works if something is still sitting in their research notebook and not yet disclosed to the legal office.

Regardless of my personal feelings on the subject of software patents I can see the perspective that some unique algorithmic approach to a very hard problem has value to the folks paying our salaries.  Given folks do disagree on the subject and I'm not inclined to tell other inventors what to do with their stuff the only thing I want to do is say: "What my team has personally created you all can use as long as we all share it".

Who are the osedu folks?  Their www.osedu.org page tells me they are running Apache on CentOS but not much more. :)

Question:  Would a license like MS-RL with the patent modification from ECL 2.0 be viewed favorably or not?  Given Matthew's statement it seems ECL 2.0 was approved with the understanding that they would move to Apache but I cannot make that same promise.  While I would be trying to move an organization toward more open source there is no certainty that the organization's view on IP will significantly change given the large majority of our work is either not releasable or done for others.

Happy Thanksgiving!
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