Open Source Software Licensing

There's a lot of existing policy that should be brought into consideration, including the Cabinet Office policy on open source software and the Lambert Review conducted a few years ago. The former, discussing the use of software within government offers "parity of esteem" for open source and proprietary software, the latter considers the wider issue of maximising innovation and IP exploitation for government funded R&D.

There is also a need for the government to avoid doing anything that created barriers to the internal market or free trade generally

It would seem strange for government to release tax funded software under a licence that resulted in innovation favouring one sector and discriminating against another in competing for future work.

While as Chair of the Open Source Consortium I would want to see the licence being Free or at least OSI approved, I also recognise that some taxpayers release proprietary software...

All of the forgoing points to the use of permissive licences such as LGPL to maximise the value contained within the project while still allowing proprietary software developers to benefit, followed by a BSD style licence which de-emphasizes keeping the value within the project, EUPL for single market reasons or public domain for simplicity.

It's our software and the best way to keep it so is to license it under some version of the GPL. I believe that Dr Andrew John Hughes said it all.

Simon Dickson tells us that the Government "takes a chunk of a company's profits..." by way of VAT, amongst other things, and, therefore, that company should have some stake in our software. Well, let me remind everybody that VAT is an end-user tax; most companies will be VAT registered and thus claim the VAT back from HM Revenue and Customs. It's a fact that the majority of VAT is paid by us.

We elect the Government to represent us, and our Government taxes companies on our behalf. Why, then, should Government software, that we've all paid for, be hijacked by a company just because it has been licensed under a permissive license. Furthermore, why should we then have to pay for it a second time by buying it back from that company. Tom gives a good example of this hijacking of FLOSS by Apple Inc. This is what happens when software, such as FreeBSD, is released under such a permissive license.

Chris Puttick suggests the Creative Commons Attribution license for software libraries, but even the Creative Commons organization itself recommends that no software should be licensed under such a license.

As Dr Andrew John Hughes says, the GPL, AGPL, and LGPL, surely is the only choice in order to keep our software free.

A permissive licence allows the next user to have the greatest freedom by allowing them to do anything, even close development on their derivative software.

A copyleft licence provides greatest freedom to end users of the software and its derivatives, by not allowing people to take away the freedoms that are the basis of free software.

Copyleft still allows commercial exploitation. Free software by definition must allow it. Anybody arguing that a permissive licence should be used over a copyleft licence based on commercial usability is missing this important fact.

Others have commented on the use of weaker copyleft or permissive licences working well for certain projects, however, I have only ever seen this where the project already has good momentum. I had never even heard of Spark before I read this.

In the post, the principles of re‐use, and sharing, and cost‐saving are outlined. To me, a copyleft licence is by far the best fit, because not only does it encourage immediate re‐use and sharing, it does so to the maximum extent possible.

In choosing a licence, avoid creating a new one, we have enough to choose from and confuse people with already. Pick one that’s popular, and largely understood. I would go with either GPL v3, or AGPL v3 (which is pretty much just an extension of the GPL for services delivered over a network).

There is no simple answer to this question and anyone who provides a "one size fits all" answer probably has a personal agenda of some sort.

Each case should be examined individually.

I recommend you contact OSS Watch a non-advocacy advisory service to the Higher and Further Education sector. They can be contacted via info@oss-watch.ac.uk (disclaimer: I work for OSS Watch)

The first issue to address it to clarify the objectives for the licensing. As this is investigated, it will become clear that it will not be a one-size-fits-all solution. There may be some components that cannot be licensed freely as they are already owned or licensed elsewhere. Other components may benefit greatly from having a very permissive license to encourage commercial interest and development or inclusion in propriety solutions.

The people behind these selections must be impartial and experienced within the Open Source licensing world to ensure correct assignments are made to reduce the chances of encumbering future developments and innovation.

There has been many commercial projects I have worked on over the last 15 years which have overcome these same challenges.The hardest part is often the education of the stakeholders as to the best long-term choices.

There is no doubt that Open Source will be a major part of the future of the Public Sector, it just needs to be executed in the correct manner and be saved from the empires and and monopolies that get built when departments find they no longer have any real value to add.

Much of my software is publicly funded, and MIT, BSD or (perhaps best of all) Apache 2 strike me as the best for this field.

However more significant is how the community around the software is organised. GPL is typically touted as ensuring freedom, but the success of the Apache project has not required a copyleft licence.

Good governance, social norms, and infrastructure support work to support ongoing development. It would be worth talking to OSSWatch, who I've found very helpful.

The EU FOSS licence: NO, it's not "just another licence". This one is FSF and FOSS compliant, conforms with the law of ALL 27 member states and has been tested
to comply with the EU and member state laws. A catch-all means that there are no problems with determining applicable law and jurisdiction - all this has the bonus that there is no question as to whether a court will deem the licence to be valid (that is, the licence will not be questioned, just the acts or deeds in relation to the licence).

Preamble, licence and Guidelines for users and developers, with links to all languages:-

http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/eup

I think the only license that truly protects open source software is GPL. You only have to see how Apple have taken the BSD license and made a fortune out of it without contributing as much as a byte of code to the community to see why nothing less than GPL will do.

Apple have done nothing illegal or even immoral, but it shows how weak the BSD license really is at protecting something that was in spirit supposed to be shared freely and not just exploited.

If you want to protect your code assets right to remain free you need also to consider the possibility of patent threats. Again GPL 3 attempts to assist this protection, However if the UK government is serious about using open source technology then it should seriously review its recent policies on software patents which are not helping the protection of free software and creating uncertainty among developers (and potential developers) of open source. If you want the open source market to grow then remove the software patent legislation.

For code libraries (as opposed to full applications) I would relax the license to LGPL. There is value in allowing libraries to be exploited commercially and may even keep costs down. For example if the crown were to contribute a standard library for income tax calculations then this could be slotted into commercial payroll systems. Thus when tax changes are made, a new library could be released and it would save a small fortune in re-development costs from individual payroll system providers. It would also make the Payroll Systems market more competative.

Of course this would require careful design of the API to ensure robust future proof integration.

I think it depends on the goals of licensing, and also on the project, and sometimes the toolset you want to use.

As a tax payer I hope you will chose a license that minimizes costs to the tax payer. Since this would presumably involve not paying repeatedly for variants of your own software at a later date, a copyleft license would seem appropriate.

One must also check the license is consist with the other components with which a project works.

Since I want other people to use it, and copyleft will discourage that somewhat, something like the Affero GPL makes it easy for people to get the source, and any modification if appropriate.

That's really the question here. Choosing a license which allows proprietary forks to be developed, such as MIT, BSD or the Apache license, will allow others to profit from government work without contributing anything back. In contrast, the GPL licenses encourage sharing and community development around the code, and I think that's the right course to take.

The point about 'maximum usage' made by others is one that is often heard from proponents of the permissive non-copyleft licenses. It's true that some may be dissuaded from using the software because of this. But is this really helpful to the project anyway? If the license is a problem, it's not because they want to contribute to the project but because they want to distribute their own modifications in a proprietary form and not give back to the community. This may result in an slightly larger number of users of the project, but those users will be vastly more divided.

Releasing software as open source is one thing. It is quite another to build a successful community around it, as efforts by various companies have shown. The most successful communities I can think of are around GPLed projects such as Linux (the kernel) and the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). Both have contributions from volunteers and companies alike (including IBM, Oracle and Red Hat), who work as equals for the good of the project. In contrast, you don't see a significant community around the Apache projects. Instead, forks of these works appear in other projects such as the fork of Apache's Java XML libraries in the OpenJDK codebase maintained by Oracle.

Government development, funded by public money, should not be a source of wealth for proprietary software companies. Please choose a copyleft license appropriate to the project in question (i.e. AGPLv3 for websites, GPLv3 for programs, LGPLv3 for libraries) which will centralise development and help promote a community around the project.

GNU GPL is a real issue for anyone attempting to connect from the commercial world. Clearly one aim of the data (and code) release(s) is to empower the use of the data. Many industry developers have clear bans on GPL and similar licenses as they prevent use in anything remotely commercial or with elements of closed source (i.e. any commercial enterprise with sensible license control, typically prevents usage where it maybe wise for the open data/software to be used).

BSD, APACHE or MIT would be wiser in my opinion as it allows controlled commercial usage meaning a wider (and real world) usage which could be prevented otherwise.

This depends on your goals.

The key question is whether you want maximum usage, including commercial exploitation, or whether you want to ensure any extensions or associated software are also open source.

Assuming you want maximum usage then avoid copyleft. While MIT/BSD are very open and good defaults in that case, there's an argument that Apache v2.0 is a better choice because it covers patent license as well, not just copyright. Whether you can actually offer Apache license will depend how good your contributor tracking processes are.

You might consider applying more than one license? For example jquery licenses under both MIT and GPL http://jquery.org/license

Desktop application: GPL.

Web application: AGPL.

Library: MIT/BSD.

As a matter of public policy, I think the government should be favouring GPL and AGPL in most circumstances, except where there is a reason to favour MIT/BSD. The reason why that would be is simply that if you have produced a library that is of use to programmers, releasing that as MIT/BSD means that it can be modified by a lot more people and reused inside commercial applications and so on.

Please, please, don't use any licence other than one of the ones listed above. There's too much confusion and too many damn licenses out there already. Stick to GPL, MIT/BSD and AGPL and life will be much easier.