An Open Source License for Education?

Erno_Rubaiyat asks: "The educational foundation that I work for is preparing to release some software. We are committed to releasing it with an Open Source license, but are unsure what license to use. I was curious if anyone had considered or compared the Sakai license to the Creative Commons licenses? I like the Sakai license because it is so simple, but does it leave any obvious areas open for abuse? As a side note: we are including several packages that are licensed under the LGPL and the GPL. Are there any pitfalls that we should be aware of while licensing our 'original' work with a different license than these components?"

Comments

I suggest the GPL, here's why.

[Hobart]

The GPL and BSD licenses are the most well understood licenses out there, and hence when someone else is considering using your code, they'll know right away what to expect.

Other less well-known licenses like Sakai should be left to organizations that have a legal department to make those decisions for them. The last thing you probably want is someone who might join in your software community and contribute useful changes back to you to be scared off by an unfamiliar license.

Re:Creative commons is more about doco

[david.given]

GPL like: You cannot use this software except with other open source software.

NO! NO! WRONG!

I'm sorry, but you're not doing anybody any favours here. You're making a huge, fundamental mistake that's just going to mislead people. This mistake is made over and over again and is the OSS community's biggest problem...

You see, none of these license say anything about how you can use the software. The GPL even explicitly states this. They are concerned solely with how you may redistribute changed copies of the software.

Here's the corrected version, to the best of my knowledge:

• GPL like: you may only distribute a changed copy of the software if your changes are licensed under the GPL. Copyright on the unchanged portions is retained.
• BSD like: you may distribute changed copies of the software however you like. Copyright on the unchanged portions is retained.
• Public domain: the original copyright holder relinquishes all rights to the software.

The corrolory to the above is: if you don't distribute your changes, the licenses are irrelevant, because their redistribution licenses, not user licenses. (This is why it's incorrect to use the GPL as an EULA.)

I don't know enough about the LGPL to comment; I believe that it's similar to the GPL, but has a much laxer definition of what constitutes a changed copy of the software.

Please, this is important. It's worth your while to try and get it right!