[License-discuss] US Army Research Laboratory Open Source License proposal
Karan, Cem F CIV USARMY RDECOM ARL (US)
cem.f.karan.civ at mail.mil
Fri Jul 22 21:01:22 UTC 2016
Hi, my name is Cem Karan. I work for the US Army Research Laboratory (ARL) in
Adelphi, MD. I'm in charge of defining the Open Source policy for ARL. As a
part of this, we need a license that meets our legal and regulatory needs, but
is ideally fully interchangeable with everything licensed under the Apache 2
license as defined at http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.txt. We also
want our license to be fully accepted by OSI as a valid Open Source license.
Unfortunately, we cannot directly use the Apache 2 license for all of our
code. Most of our researchers work for the US Federal Government and under US
copyright law any works they produce during the course of their duties do not
have copyright attached, so we have to rely on contract law as a protection
mechanism within the USA. We considered using NOSA 1.3
(https://opensource.org/licenses/NASA-1.3), but apparently that it isn't
interoperable with other licenses. As I understand it, some work on the NOSA
2.0 license was done to improve interoperability, but that work is currently
stalled.
For that reason, we've tried to modify the Apache 2.0 license to fit our
needs. The license in full is below and can be diffed with license text found
at http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.txt with relative ease; the text
has also been attached to this email in case my mail client scrambles the
formatting. The summary of changes are as follows:
1) Changed the name and version number.
2) Changed the definition of 'Licensor' to use 'project originator' instead of
'copyright owner'.
3) Changed the definition of 'Work' to not use the word 'copyright'.
4) Changed the definition of 'Contributor' to use 'author' instead of
'copyright owner'.
5) Removed the word 'copyright' from the Appendix's instructions
6) In the notice, removed the word 'Copyright'
7) In the notice, changed 'copyright owner' to Licensor.
8) Scrambled the URL as we don't have one yet.
In general, we want our license to provide the following:
- Protection against liability, not only for ourselves, but also for anyone
that contributes to our projects.
- Protection against fraud where derivative work is represented as being the
original.
- Protection against malicious contributors that intend to entangle projects
with IP headaches (patent trolls and the like). This must protect not only
protect the US Government, but also anyone that downloads our code (just like
the Apache 2 license does).
- The ability to deal with contributions where copyright may or may not be
attached. If there is copyright attached, the License should treat it as
similarly as possible to the Apache 2.0 license. If there is no copyright
attached, then the contribution is in the public domain, but it may have
patent or other IP rights that also need to be dealt with.
Finally, there is opinion within the US Government that while there is no US
copyright protection, copyright attaches outside of the US. Thus, if a
project is downloaded and used outside of the USA, then any work produced by a
US Government employee will have foreign copyright protection, and the terms
of the License should apply to that copyright as well.
Comments on this proposed license are much appreciated.
Thank you,
Cem Karan
"""
U.S. Army Research Laboratory Open Source License (ARL OSL)
Version 0.2, July 2016
http://no/URL/as/yet
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APPENDIX: How to apply the U.S. Army Research Laboratory Open Source
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"""
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