EPICS Open License (U.S. gov't DOE / ANL project).

[Karl Fogel]

John Scott III just mentioned the EPICS project on another list -- see
details quoted below.

Their license seems pretty open source-ish to me, at first glance,
though it might be more obviously if the word "specified" were removed
from clause 4(c).  They obviously meant it to be open source.  I'm
guessing clauses 5 and 7 were the special sauce DOE needed.

Do we have any history of consideration of this license?  Should we
invite them to submit it?  Or has anyone ever talked to DOE to see if
maybe nowadays they could use a standard open source license?  I wanted
to find out about any history here, before contacting them.

Thanks,
-Karl

> another us gov sponsored OSS project, although they built their own
> license -
> 
>   EPICS
>   http://www.aps.anl.gov/epics/license/index.php
> 
> The EPICS Open license was derived from the old and more restrictive
> EPICS Base license and includes certain wording required by the the US
> Department of Energy (which is why we can't just use something like
> the modified BSD license). It is intended to comply with the Open
> Source Definition, but has not been submitted for approval to the OSI
> panel.
> 
> http://www.aps.anl.gov/epics/ 
> 
> EPICS Home Page
> 
> EPICS is a set of Open Source software tools, libraries and
> applications developed collaboratively and used worldwide to create
> distributed soft real-time control systems for scientific instruments
> such as a particle accelerators, telescopes and other large scientific
> experiments.