Hi Darren - thanks for your thoughts.
> Given that FSL has been released under GPL in the first place, it must be
> very tricky to avoid now violating the original GPL with this new licence.
Not really - of course, you are right that the old release must stay
covered by the GPL, but there is no licencing-related reason why one
should stick with an old licence for a new release, as long as one is the
owner of the software's IP. When the GPL talks about software "derived"
that is referring to when third parties take your software and re-release
it, not if the owner comes up with a new version. The GPL makes a
difference between holders of the copyright and licencees. We don't
develop on the basis of licencing the software from ourselves (!) but as
the authors...and it doesn't seem likely that the University would take
itself to court over GPL issues, amusing though that would be ;-)
Actually, a far bigger problem than any of this is that no-one seems to be
able to agree on how to spell licence...
Wrt MEDx, no, MEDx is not released under GPL but under it's own licencing
arrangements - as stated in our old licence, we could release FSL to
specific organisations under any other conditions other than GPL if that
was separately organised.
> I suspect that you all prefer to get on with the business of fMRI/MRI
> analysis and this arose out of hassles from the legals dept. of Oxford.
Indeed - we're not terribly interested in the licencing side of this
ourselves given that neither version of the licence affects all the
academic users of FSL - as you say, we are more excited about the science.
Thanks, Steve
Stephen M. Smith
Head of Image Analysis, FMRIB
Oxford University Centre for Functional MRI of the Brain
John Radcliffe Hospital, Headington, Oxford OX3 9DU, UK
+44 (0) 1865 222726 (fax 222717)
[log in to unmask] http://www.fmrib.ox.ac.uk/~steve
|