ECL 2.0 and New Questions!

[Christopher D. Coppola]

Nigel,

My name is Chris Coppola and I'm one of the "osedu" folks. :-)

I am really only using that domain because I wanted a neutral place  
between multiple education open source communities that share  
licensing practices. I work with, The Sakai Foundation (www.sakaiproject.org 
) and the Kuali Foundation (www.kuali.org) and both produce open  
source applications for education.

If I can be of any help let me know. Here's a recent blog post that  
talks about our IP management practices (including licensing). It  
refers to a fair amount of additional documentation on these practices  
and some of the history that got us here:

http://coppola.rsmart.com/node/43

/chris
--
the rSmart group
Chris Coppola | 602.490.0472
blog: coppola.rsmart.com

On Nov 22, 2007, at 4:43 AM, Tzeng, Nigel H. wrote:

>
> >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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