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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?"
I have a similar question that has been in the back of my head for a long time. Most F/OSS licenses only consider derived works to be improvements to your program or new programs which are released with some of your IP. I wonder if there was some license that was more restrictive, that also considered the output of modified programs as publishing a derived work. If I open source great simulation software, other researchers would be allowed to make substantial changes, generate output, and publish papers without contributing the code changes to the community. Academic integrity does limit how frequently this occurs. And many are happy to have your springboard that they do collaborate with you. Also, the journals often at least require them to document their procedure so that you can eventually figure out what they did & change it yourself. But is there any legally-binding & accepted license to protect you from when the system doesn't work?
"You can license what people are allowed to do with your product."
This is far from legally clear. Copyright law only restricts certain things. The main one it restricts is copying and distributing copies. The reason that open source licences work is that in order to redistribute you need the authors permission. A copyright licence (such as (L)GPL or BSD) is a limited permission to do something which copyright law would otherwise prohibit.
On the other hand, you don't need the author's permission to run software and you probably don't need it to modify the software either. (Modifying on a computer necessarily involves copying but this form of copying may well not be regulated by copyright).
The non-free licences which purport to restrict lots of other things are End User Licence Agreements. Whether EULAs are ever valid is unclear. If they are valid it is because they form part of the contract of sale of the software: an EULA rests on contract law. In that sense it is not a licence at all.
In summary, under copyright law, you need a licence to release software where the copyright is owned by someone else but you don't need a licence to publish papers or give talks. Hence copyright licences can restrict releasing software but they can't directly restrict writing papers or giving talks.