A couple of weeks back, I was somewhat disturbed to read a post by Unicon’s John Lewis on the forthcoming Version 2.0 of the Educational Commons License (ECL), which is used by both the Sakai and the Kuali projects. While pointing out some significant improvements over the previous version, John notes correctly that the proliferation of open source licenses has a cost in terms of confusion in the marketplace and wonders why Sakai and Kuali can’t just use the Apache license upon which ECL is based. (After all, he observes, Moodle uses plain vanilla GPL.) So John did a little digging, and the only difference he could find between ECL and the Apache license was a clause on patents. Specifically, ECL weakens Apache’s patent protection clause.
Seeing this, I contacted Chris Coppola, the Sakai board member who has been leading the charge on licensing issues. Chris was gracious enough to post more detail on the issue and help me get in contact with other folks who could help me make sure that I understand the legal implications correctly. Now, I happen to trust Chris’s judgment and motivation, and I am confident that the license would have come out the right way if he had final say. Unfortunately, he does not. Nor does anyone on the Sakai Foundation Board. As a result, ECL 2.0 is disturbingly flawed from the perspective of the edupatent crisis. (more…)