re: apache license 2.0: having trouble getting our university licensing office to like it, your thoughts?

[Tom Plunkett <th...@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Jul 1, 2009 at 9:24 PM, <le...@apache.org> wrote:
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: John Owens <jo...@yahoo.com>
> To: legal-discuss@apache.org
> Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2009 18:42:09 -0700 (PDT)
> Subject: apache license 2.0: having trouble getting our university licensing office to like it, your thoughts?
>
> Howdy, I'm a professor at an unnamed campus of the University of
> California and lead an open-source project. The project is currently
> licensed under a modified BSD license (that has a couple of extra
> clauses from plain BSD). We would like to move the project to Google
> Code and use Apache 2.0 to license it there (our industrial
> collaborator prefers Apache 2.0). Our licensing office at my campus
> does not like Apache (but would allow us to use BSD or another license
> that does not have the patent clause) and I was hoping to get your
> guidance / advice / thoughts on the difficulty I'm having.


John,

One possibility is to look at this as an open source evangelism
opportunity.  The business people in the licensing office look at
everything from an ROI perspective, i.e. how does the university get
revenue out of university assets?

Perhaps your licensing office office is unaware of all of the business
benefits the UC system and your industrial collaborator would receive
from moving your project to Google code.

Perhaps your licensing office does not know whether there actually are
any patent rights involved.  Has anyone made an effort to determine
whether anything would be given away by making your code open source?
Perhaps your licensing office is unaware that you did not file any
patents on the code you are giving away.  Reducing the risk that
patent rights are involved might alleviate some of the licensing
office's concerns.


Regards,

Tom

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