The NYT today writes: "To remove obstacles to joint research, four leading technology companies and seven American universities have agreed on principles for making software developed in collaborative projects freely available."

The subject is an agreement brokered by the Kauffman Foundation whereby intellectual property in software created via collaborations between the academic and industry signatories* will be made part of a "royalty free public commons (a body of knowledge that can be freely used by the public)," if the parties agree in the specific instance.

The prose of the statement of Open Collaboration Principles is murky -- a cross between legalese and academic-speak qualified by many footnotes -- and I may not fully grasp it, but a crucial part of it is baffling.

The statement emphasizes that the products of a Free Public Collaboration should be available free of charge for "commercial or academic use by every member of the public." It also notes that: "The right to use the intellectual property commercially is key to incenting the participation of commercial entities in these projects." (Note: It is key to incenting the universities, too, which regard intellectual property licensing as an important source of revenue.)

BUT - the General Public License (GPL), which governs Linux and many other important open source programs, is specifically designed to prevent incorporation of GPLed code into commercial software programs. To the extent commercialization is permitted, as is the case when the program is used only internally and not further distributed or is embedded in a hardware device, many GPL purists regard it as a "loophole," and the practice is certain to be attacked in next year's debate over GPLv3.

So one possible interpretation of this agreement is that it signals a split in the open source movement, with the signatories signaling that they are abandoning the GPL in favor of other open source licenses, such as the BSD. Now THAT would be a story.

UPDATE (12/22/05): Here is a response of the participants to a query about the issue.

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*Summit participants developing and adopting these principles include the Kauffman Foundation, Carnegie Mellon University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Stanford, University of California at Berkeley, University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign, University of Texas at Austin, Cisco, HP, IBM and Intel. Additional collaborators include the National Science Foundation, the Office of U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman and the National Academies' Government University Industry Research Roundtable (GUIRR).

posted by James DeLong @ 11:08 AM | Software

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