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Re: Request for copyright consent forms

 

There might be an escape from this. If UCSD's problem is with the patent clause in (L)GPL, you could instead ask if you might be allowed to provide code under the BSD licence. The BSD license has no patent clause so hopefully they will find it acceptable. It was also originally written by the University of California so presumably they're OK with it.

The point is that BSD is (L)GPL compatible so it is legally possible to incorporate BSD code in LGPL code and distribute the resulting code as LGPL. I think this fixes the problem.

Regards,

David

On 15/02/11 01:13, Johan Hake wrote:
On Wednesday February 9 2011 19:37:10 Ridgway Scott wrote:
I suspect this will be a general problem at all U.S. Universities.

Yeah, I pretty much have stalled here. Their final answer was:

   What the institution is being asked to sign is consent that the
   institution's IP be licensed under the LGPL V3. We do not consent to that,
   for the reasons I've been giving you. I don't know if I can make it any less
   complicated than that.

They did not answer my "what with the already contributed code" question
either. But then I am not sure I want to know the answer. Maybe it is best to
give up to get the consent from UCSD and let silence test the system?

Johan


Ridg

On Feb 9, 2011, at 7:28 PM, Johan Hake wrote:
On Wednesday February 9 2011 18:23:51 Andy Ray Terrel wrote:
On Wed, Feb 9, 2011 at 5:48 PM, Johan Hake<johan.hake@xxxxxxxxx>

wrote:
On Wednesday February 9 2011 15:37:38 Andy Ray Terrel wrote:
On Wed, Feb 9, 2011 at 12:37 PM, Anders Logg<logg@xxxxxxxxx>

wrote:
On Wed, Feb 09, 2011 at 10:23:44AM -0800, Johan Hake wrote:
On Wednesday February 9 2011 10:14:51 Johan Hake wrote:
On Wednesday February 9 2011 10:10:04 Anders Logg wrote:
On Wed, Feb 09, 2011 at 09:52:21AM -0800, Johan Hake wrote:
Hello!

UCSD is not willing to sign the consent statement about GPL
3...

 From the answer I got:
  LGPL incorporates GPL 3, and that is the problem. Earlier

versions of the GPL did not deal in patent rights, while
Version 3 does. It would commit a license to the entire UC
patent estate, whether the inventors were an informed
participant or not. I would need to consult further with UC
General Counsel for a detailed answer, but the spirit is that
the license overreaches in its commitments to patent rights
beyond what the university is willing to do.

That seems strange. So UCSD will want to retain the right to
sue
users of DOLFIN if you should happen to add code to DOLFIN that
infringes on some patent held by UCSD?

I have no clue what it means. But I will ask.

Here is a more elaborated explaination:
  The language is pretty clear in section 11 of the GPL V3

license -
it commits all the rights of the Licensor (the Regents of the
University of California) to a license. Our normal licensing
practice is to license one technology at a time, and we do not
license the other patents along with it. Our guiding principles
for
licensing are at this link

  <http://invent.ucsd.edu/faculty/policies/guiding-principles.shtml

Johan

Is it this paragraph?

"Each contributor grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-
free
patent license under the contributor's essential patent claims, to
make, use, sell, offer for sale, import and otherwise run,
modify and
propagate the contents of its contributor version."

Assuming that something in your contract makes UCSD the
"contributor"
and not you personally, this means that UCSD grants any patent
licenses needed to run the code that you put into FEniCS.

The other option is to reserve the right to sue the users of
FEniCS
for any UCSD patents that your code in FEnICS is infringing upon.

As far as I understand, it doesn't say anything about other
patents
that UCSD have that are unrelated to the actual code in FEniCS.

If they refuse to sign the consent form, will they also refuse
to let
you continue to contribute code to FEniCS? And sue us all for
the code
you have contributed so far?

--
Anders

In the US, code and patentable "Intellectual Property" is usually
considered property of the employer.  So the contributor has no
right
to give away the rights of a company's patents.  If they sign this
form and Johan uploads something covered under another patent
then it
affects their rights to patent royalties.  So in effect they are
saying they reserve the right to sue FEniCS (but probably Simula)
if
you encroach on their patents.

In practice, most open source code from US universities is
distributed
without regard to the law and for the most part everyone ignores
it.
For example, TTI-C should be the copyright holder on much of the
code
that you wrote in Chicago.

Does your university have the same policies? I guess I should just
kept
quite then...

I'm still waiting for word back from my department, but my
contributions are so small that I don't think there could be any
claims from my employer.

Would it be a point to collect what I have done during the stay here
at UCSD,
and hopefully show that there wont be anything to claim? Most of my
work in
FEniCS I did when I was at Simula.

Johan

-- Andy

Johan

-- Andy

Are there any others that have got a similare answer?

No problems so far. Here's what we have so far:
  http://www.fenicsproject.org/pub/copyright/authors/
  http://www.fenicsproject.org/pub/copyright/institutions/

I guess the Cambridge statement is not correct?

Johan


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--
Dr David Ham
Applied Modelling and Computation Group,
Department of Earth Science and Engineering,
Imperial College London,

http://www.imperial.ac.uk/people/david.ham



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