[License-discuss] US Army Research Laboratory Open Source License proposal

[Philippe Ombredanne]

On Fri, Jul 22, 2016 at 11:01 PM, Karan, Cem F CIV USARMY RDECOM ARL
(US) <cem.f.karan.civ at mail.mil> wrote:

> 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.

What about this simpler approach: you could release your software under a choice
of two licenses:
- a public domain dedication (such as CC-0 or your own dedication)
OR
- the Apache-2.0

Could this alleviate the need to create a new license and still
address your needs?

-- 
Cordially
Philippe Ombredanne

+1 650 799 0949 | pombredanne at nexB.com
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