Release Time and Open Source Licensing

[Charlie Bailey]

A recent email conversation with one of our community members
regarding open source licensing reminded me that I wanted to start a
thread here about licensing options for the software that we are
developing as part of the Developer Community. At our last iR DevCamp
in October, one of the very last things we talked about was release
time from our full time jobs to pursue these projects, and ownership
of the resulting code. While we didn't get a whole lot of time to
discuss the topic, we did all agree that it was something that needed
to be discussed.

As far as release time goes, the development team at iR has been
charged with maintaining our various Open Source projects, and each
project manager is granted ~10% of their time to devote to these
projects. Of course, that project time is subject to the various
priorities of the day, but I ignore that caveat since everything one
does in any workplace is subject to the competing priorities of the
ever growing to-do list. Now we don't grant release time for just
anything. No time is granted for "Call of Duty" sessions, or
gardening, or guitar playing (we do have flex time, and that's a
different matter, but I digress...). The over arching assumption is
that this work on these Open Source projects will ultimately benefit
iR and the greater iR community in some way. This might not be an
immediately tangible, but the assumption is that the benefit does
indeed exist. Perhaps the benefit is as simple as having happier
employees that are encouraged to pursue development projects outside
of the scope of their assigned projects. Perhaps we're talking about
some side project that may ultimately benefit our customers in some
very tangible way. Maybe we develop a scheduler that will allow a
school to allocate resources within FileMaker Pro. The point is that
iR as an organization has embraced the idea of Open Source software as
one aspect of our business that may have long term benefit. I don't
see why this same argument can't hold true for the school setting. In
fact, Open Source software has a long history in academia (arguably
mostly in the college communities).

The other thing we have discussed is how might we license the
resulting software. We went through a number of possibilities, but
ultimately decided on the New BSD license. We arrived at this decision
after looking at a number of options, guided by several wikipedia
articles and these two very helpful posts and the New BSD License
itself:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Burnette/?p=130
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Burnette/?p=131
http://www.ohloh.net/licenses/bsd_ish

Essentially, the New BSD license allows a user to download and use the
software in any way, as long as you maintain the original copyright
notice and don't use the name of the copyright holder to promote the
product. It's very simple and straightforward and is one of the more
permissive licenses. We wanted our OS projects to reach as wide an
audience as possible, and we didn't want to restrict the future use of
this code in any way (for ourselves and others), and the New BSD
seemed the perfect fit.

I'm not saying that you should all use the New BSD - I'm just letting
you into the details of our thought process. What are your thoughts?
Have you been able to secure time to work on these projects? Have you
thought about the licensing issues?

Charlie Bailey
inRESONANCE