Dual licensing

[ChrisBeeley]

I'm reading the open working section of the Goldacre review and there is a section that says:

Adopting open working practices does not mean other countries or industry can exploit intellectual property created with state funds: there should be a robust and thoughtful exceptions framework to impose commercial licenses or restrictions on review and (separately) re-use of publicly funded code, where this is actively helpful...

I'm assuming this is recommending a dual licensing approach. Although dual licensing has been known to work well, it seems like an area fraught with complexity which the NHS is currently ill equipped to handle.

As a concept among funders and managers, dual licensing is undeniably popular, whatever the complexities, so perhaps it deserves coverage in the policy?

(just to express an opinion, I am pretty sceptical that dual licensing will ever be useful in practice. The NHS is not a software engineering enterprise and I don't think we'll ever have the expertise or the commerical nous to actually make it worthwhile)

[otlah]

This policy doesn't prevent dual licensing, which I think is the responsible place to be for now. You've hit the nail on the head with a need for further support around it and that's not a thing policy can do on its own. Luckily, we're about to conduct some work on how to guide policy implementation through commercial process, so I'll add this question to that work-stream.