About Licensing
Our group has chosen to embrace an open licensing paradigm for our work.
- GPL for code
- Creative Commons for Documents
Copyrights are used to protect rights of the creator of a product (e.g. a document, specific software code, etc.). Copyrights are different than patents in that patents are intellectual property rights for ideas not products.
Copyrights are implied on content. That is, the author of a document - even if it is NOT specified - has certain rights from the copyright act.
Copyrights can be transferred, such as what often happens when an author transfers rights to the publisher. The publisher then (often) becomes owner of the materials and has the rights to re-license it, re-format it, etc.
Open source copyrights are somewhat different than typical copyrights.
A great example of the benefits of an open source copyright, is UBC's copyright FAQ, which is derived from Waterloo's copyright FAQ. Waterloo's FAQ was copyrighted with a creative commons license, which encouraged this kind of reuse.
- Free Redistribution
- Source Code Included
- Derived Works Allowed
- Integrity of The Author's Source Code (optional)
- No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups
- No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
- Distribution of License
- License Must Not Be Specific to a Product
- License Must Not Restrict Other Software
- License Must Be Technology-Neutral
SCOOP is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
