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

["Geir Magnusson Jr." <ge...@pobox.com>]

Why is there not a problem in the UK?  Just curious.

geir

On Jun 30, 2009, at 5:06 AM, Ross Gardler wrote:

> 2009/6/30 John Owens <jo...@yahoo.com>:
>>
>> 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.
>
>
> This is a known problem with US institutions.
>
> I'm in a little bit of a hurry right now so can't lookup links but to
> help someone (Larry?) dig into the specifics of this problem I thought
> a quick mail would help:
>
> A bunch of US institutions in major projects funded by the Mellon
> Foundation created the Educational Community Licence because of this
> problem.
>
> In (approx.) 2004 my predecessor in my current job, Cliff Schmidt and
> a bunch of academic lawyer types met to discuss the problem. The
> sector wants to use the Apache licence but often cannot because of the
> patent issues.
>
> According to a report of that meeting which I found in March 2007 it
> says that this meeting agreed that there would be an Apache Licence
> 2.1 with an appropriate change that would allow the ECL code to be
> migrated to this new Apache Licence.
>
> As you can imagine, I was a little concerned when I read this so I
> called my predecessor who told me he did not recall Cliff
> (representing the ASF) to have made such a promise. I also asked on
> this list (with a link to the report), Cliff replied that yes, he was
> going to give a 2.1 text the next day (don't worry though, his reply
> came on April 1st). On April 2nd he denied any knowledge of the
> agreement, but confirmed he was at the meeting.
>
> The document I linked to provides full details of the problem the
> academic institutions have and the changes they would like to see. But
> this was never followed up here in legal-discuss.
>
> Perhaps someone can find my mail and hence a link to the report in the
> archives (reply from Ciff was on April 1st so should be easy to find)
>
> This is not a problem for us here in the UK, but there is significant
> work in the US affected by this.
>
> Ross
>
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Re: apache license 2.0: having trouble getting our university licensing office to like it, your thoughts?

[Ross Gardler <rg...@apache.org>]

2009/6/30 Justin Erenkrantz <ju...@erenkrantz.com>:
> On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 3:10 AM, Ross Gardler<rg...@apache.org> wrote:
>> 2) US publicly funded work has specific constraints on the way outputs
>> are made available for public use, the UK does not have the same
>> restrictions.
>
> Two general comments:
>
>  - Depending upon the grant, certain funding agencies place different
> restrictions on what can be released and how it can be released.
>
>  - Academic work product is treated differently from staff work
> product.  So, for example, folks that Ross would talk primarily to as
> part of OSS Watch in UK would be covered under different rules than
> say a faculty member on the academic side of things.

Just in case it is important to anyone, we deal with research staff as
well as IT staff. In the UK universities are funded in such a way that
all software production is, effectively, publicly funded (it gets
complicated with commercial sponsored research, but that's an edge
case).

However, as I mentioned earlier the patent clause does not cause a
problem for us here in the UK. So it's probably not relevant.

Ross

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

[Justin Erenkrantz <ju...@erenkrantz.com>]

On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 3:10 AM, Ross Gardler<rg...@apache.org> wrote:
> 2) US publicly funded work has specific constraints on the way outputs
> are made available for public use, the UK does not have the same
> restrictions.

Two general comments:

 - Depending upon the grant, certain funding agencies place different
restrictions on what can be released and how it can be released.

 - Academic work product is treated differently from staff work
product.  So, for example, folks that Ross would talk primarily to as
part of OSS Watch in UK would be covered under different rules than
say a faculty member on the academic side of things.

I've started an off-list discussion with John to see what I can do to
help as I know a fair bit about UCOP policies as well.  If there's
something we can do, I'll bring it back here for discussions...but
it's usually getting the right person within the UC system involved...
 -- justin

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

[Ross Gardler <rg...@apache.org>]

2009/6/30 Geir Magnusson Jr. <ge...@pobox.com>:
> Why is there not a problem in the UK?  Just curious.

As I understand it (which may be seriously flawed and not too
detailed) there are two issues at play:

1) technically the UK does not have patents in software (although in
reality they do exist)

2) US publicly funded work has specific constraints on the way outputs
are made available for public use, the UK does not have the same
restrictions.

Ross

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