Research Availability
The people pay for
government-funded research, its fruits should be available
to all of them equally. We promote Open Source / Free
Software licensing as a means of distributing research
results fairly.
We suggest two basic strategies for licensing
government-funded software work:
- One which maximizes commercial participation, but may
sometimes result in the customer paying for the same
software twice.
- One which nurtures a vigorous community development
model, but provides less opportunity for software vendors
to differentiate themselves by adding proprietary
features.
Each of these models has their disadvantages, but both are
much better than the status quo. Under the dominant model
for
technology transfer from research projects, the
customer generally does pay for the same software twice:
once with their taxes, and a second time when they purchase
a product containing that software. Rather than a wide
development community, the status quo is that research work
is often transferred to a single business, conferring a
monopoly advantage funded by public taxes.
The choice of which of our licensing models is more
effective depends on the project's goals, and should be
left to the project's technical staff and its funding
agency.
Both of these strategies are compatible with each other,
because the licenses are themselves compatible. In
developing an institutional licensing model, it's important
to pick a set of licenses that interoperate among
themselves, and interoperate with the licenses in use by
other research and by outside developers who might
collaborate upon a project.
The MIT Licensing Model
The MIT license.
The GPL Licensing Model
The GPL.
Site copyright
statement and license. Privacy
Statement.