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Reconsider use of "BSD-style" in "Commercial use" section #119

Open jcfr opened 3 years ago

jcfr commented 3 years ago

from @mhalle

Commercial use: Can we stop saying Slicer’s license is BSD-style? It isn’t. It has much more in it (patent clauses, the FDA stuff, the stuff about not including GNU, etc). It’s an open source software license with patent protection and no restrictions on commercialization.

lassoan commented 3 years ago

Since nobody has time to read the Slicer license and compare it to standard open-source licenses, it is important to tell what is a similar well-known license.

The Slicer license agreement contains two licenses. The redistribution and usage license agreement (Part B) is the important one, as the contributor license agreement (Part A) only affects a handful of developers who contribute to Slicer.

The usage license agreement is essentially BSD. There is no mention of patents there. There are several additions, but they are mostly clarifications, recommendations, or just purely informational. We got the license reviewed by OSI recently and their concern with this part was only the "in compliance with all applicable governmental laws" requirement, i.e., that illegal use of Slicer is not permitted. This may be an important issue in general (for example for a secure chat application); but it is not expected to cause much trouble for a medical application like Slicer.

The contributor license agreement (part A) is similar to Apache CLA (https://www.apache.org/licenses/contributor-agreements.html#clas) with the explicit patent usage rights, so we could mention this somewhere. But since this only affects about 10 people I don't think that we need to discuss this on the frontpage.

There is some more information about the license that we'll add to the Slicer documentation. It is mostly a summary of the result of the OSI committee discussion.