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

[Lawrence Rosen]

Cem Karan wrote:

> 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.  

 

I don't understand your worry. Not only can't you assert copyright in the U.S., you can't prevent anyone in the U.S. from copying or modifying those works even without any license needed from you. You can't even rely on contract law in the U.S. to protect against those uses here. I have personally, on occasion, considered filing a Freedom of Information Act request for useful government code to see if that works to pry free software from government hands. I never did that. The U.S. government has almost always proven to be very generous without demands.

 

It is true that this public domain result doesn't apply outside the U.S. But if you apply a valid open source license to it – such as Apache 2.0 – that should be good enough for everyone who doesn't live in the U.S. and irrelevant for us here.

 

/Larry

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Karan, Cem F CIV USARMY RDECOM ARL (US) [mailto:cem.f.karan.civ at mail.mil] 
Sent: Friday, July 22, 2016 2:01 PM
To: license-discuss at opensource.org
Subject: [License-discuss] US Army Research Laboratory Open Source License proposal

 

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> 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> 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> 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

 

"""

 

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