One of the key value propositions of the Sakai Foundation is clean intellectual property of our shared code – while things like signed contribution agreements and copyright audits may seem like they are not in the spirit of “open and fun” – these things are what allows us to truly be open and freely work together.
They say that “from time to time the tree of freedom must be refreshed by patriots” – In intellectual property, “from time to time in an open source project “the cleanliness of the IP must be refreshed from time to time with a number of E-Mails and a bunch of small commits”.
I just cleaned up a lot of lax and unintentional poor IP practice over the past four days and I very much appreciate everyone’s cooperation and understanding as the commits rolled by.
The good news is that our IP is *much cleaner* now than it was for Sakai 2.5. There is more work to do – after my informal audit – the Foundation will be hiring experts to do a formal audit.
Here is my report to the community – sent to the dev list.
If you have been watching the commits – you have seen a flurry of little changes cleaning up copyright and changing from the Educational Community License 1.0 to the Educational Community License 2.0. Hopefully all of the changes will just come to you on your next svn update.
We picked the timing for this effort to be right before a code freeze to make branch management as easy as possible.
The good news is that the copyright in Sakai is much cleaner now that it was before.
Also, the ECL 2.0 is a very good license compared to the ECL 1.0 license. The ECL 1.0 license dates back to 2004 and the Sakai Project – we made up our own license – we put in words that *sounded good* – initially when we were just four schools the fact that we were not experts in license making – it was OK.
But as we grew and folks interested in Sakai stared looking at the license they began to point our flaws in the ECL license. One organization would not adopt Sakai because of a clause in the license. Sadly, none of those clauses were there because the original license drafters *intended* to put imperfect clauses in the ECL 1.0 – instead we were just inexperienced.
Two years ago, folks started researching possible new licenses for Sakai – we looked closely at what was wrong with ECL 1.0 and what our real intentions were. This research led to a summit of lawyers and tech transfer folks funded by the Mellon Foundation and hosted by Brad Wheeler at Indianapolis. This group of folks took the Apache 2 license, changed as few words as they could to meet the unique needs to Universities and produced ECL 2.0.
Then Chris Coppola and Brad undertook the arduous process of getting the new license approved and on the OSI approved list:
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/ecl2.php
This took months of careful work. Once the license was approved by OSI group Sakai board formally adopted the license in September 2007.
http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/confluence/display/SBCO/Board+Minutes+of+Sept+12+2007
At that time we were in the throes of 2.5 so we decided to hold off changing the license until 2.6 for ease of 2-5-x branch management. We also wanted time for dev testing and a QA cycle even though these should only be comment changes.
Over the weekend, the changes were applied – there are still a few little things I am tracking down – such as some files with contributor copyrights instead of Sakai Foundation copyrights – but those will be done in the next days and weeks – the majority of the modifications are done and checked in.