Big Picture of Academic Licenses

As you have seen, academic open source licenses are typically short and to-the-point. Often less than a page in length, academic licenses intend to grant to everyone all the copyrights and patent rights needed to exercise software freedom. There are few conditions in such licenses. A licensee, at most, needs to accept the absence of warranty or liability and to acknowledge the contributions of the original authors.

The brevity of most academic licenses is encouraging to users but somewhat perplexing to attorneys . Before open source licenses, it was not unusual to see multi-page licenses, with lots of terms and conditions that clearly defined the expectations of the parties. But with open source academic licenses, licensors have no expectations for what happens with their works. In a form of generosity not typical for major software companies, those licensors are entirely comfortable giving up any vestiges of control over what happens to their works after they are released to the world.

A different kind of academic license, the Academic Free License, handles the academic open source bargain in a more comprehensive way. I will defer commenting on that license until Chapter 9, after I describe the GPL and other reciprocal licenses in the next few chapters.