Licensing Woes...

Anyone out there that will be taking our class on open source this fall (taught by Pam Samuelson, Steve Weber and Mitch Kapor) will soon appreciate this (if they don't already): In the process of managing the development of the Verified Voting Foundation's Election Incident Reporting System (EIRS) I've realized that four major pieces of open source software were used to cobble EIRS together in order to have it ready for the 2004 election and each has a different license (GPL, LGPL, aGPL and BSD). Fortunately, only two of those licenses are incompatible (the GPL and aGPL)... but there's a twist: the aGPL and GPLv3 will be compatible when v3 of the GPL is finally released. So, we either have to not release this software until v3 comes out (which sounds like 2007) and then up-license the GPLv2 and aGPL code to GPLv3, or we have to cut out the aGPL code and license everything under GPLv2.

This isn't to dis the code; it's quite extensible and elegant. It's just that every development team has to think about these things eventually, and it's easier on everyone if a project has a well thought-out licensing strategy from the beginning. Lesson: before beginning development always ask 1) what's the license? and 2) do I have to assign my copyright to contribute code?