NAMIC Wiki:Community Licensing Institutional Experiences

Please add site-specific information about licensing policies and precedents here.

BWH

Slicer versions starting with 2.0 are copyright BWH (previous versions were copyright MIT). BWH legal staff required a "non-clinical" clause in the new license to minimize liability for clinical code released to the community. Discussions are ongoing between NA-MIC investigators and BWH officials to find the best way to meet NIH goals while protecting BHW from liability.

Experience from other sites would be a big help in furthering this discussion.

As a result of these discussions, lawyers at BWH have created a new set of language (note: updated to version 1.0 December 20, 2005):

• Slicer license in microsoft word format
• Slicer license as text

University of Utah

SCIRun and some related projects are now distributed under the MIT License.

Stanford (Simbios)

SDIWG:Software_Engineering_At_Stanford#Software_licensing_terms_for_Simbios (A BSD license).

Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK) / Insight Software Consortium (ISC)

ITK was developed under contract to the National Library of Medicine at NIH. The contract explicitly spelled out that data and software was to be publically available. The six principle contractors (three academic, three commercial) were required to accept these conditions in order to receive funding under this contract.

Early in the project it was decided to assign copyright to the non-profit Insight Software Consortium, an educational corporation organized to promote the use and dissemination of open source software. ISC may also hold IP (e.g., copyright, trademarks). Finally, ISC grants licenses under BSD. The ISC is also designed as a legal shield for contributors of open source software.

The ISC web pages can be found at http://www.insightsoftwareconsortium.org/

GE and VTK (Visualization Toolkit)

VTK was created as part of a textbook. The copyright was (and still is) held by the three principle others of the textbook (Schroeder, Martin, Lorensen). These authors were employees of GE, but obtained permission to create the book and VTK software. While this initial arrangement was not unusual, when GE began contributing software to VTK the situation became more interesting.

Eventually the VTK community had developed the software to the point that the software was valuable to GE (the GE R&D Center and GE Medical Systems). Company funding began to be directed towards developing additional functionality. GE realized the benefits of open source software and decided to contribute code to the VTK community. As a result, formal documents were drawn up and a process was establised to assign copyright from GE to the VTK copyright holders. Thus far several dozen classes have been contributed by GE to VTK.

Kitware, VTK (Visualization Toolkit) and ITK

Kitware routine develops and contributes code to VTK, ITK, CMake and many other open source tools. Often this work is done under contract to commercial entities, as well as federal agencies. If necessary (particularly with commercial entities), copyright is formally transferred to the appropriate copyright holders (for VTK, ITK, CMake, etc.).

Isomics, Inc.

Isomics is a technology development company working on both proprietary and open software projects. The license to be applied to any work is defined in the scope of work for the project. Isomics plays an important role in the development of 3D Slicer in colloration with BWH and with several national consortia (Morphometry BIRN, Function BIRN, NA-MIC...); work done on these projects by Isomics and it's subcontractors is made available through the 3D Slicer Software License.

AFNI - NIH and Medical College of Wisconsin

AFNI (afni.nimh.nih.gov/afni/about/legal) is widely used for fMRI analysis and is released GPL. The AFNI legal page includes the following disclaimer:

AFNI, its associated programs, and its documentation are provided as is, and no warranty for their correctness or usefulness for any purpose is made or implied by the Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), by the authors of the software, or by anyone else. Neither MCW, the NIH, nor the authors accept any liability for any defects in this software or its manuals, or for any damages caused by use of this software. Clinical applications are not recommended or advised; this software is designed for research purposes only. AFNI has not been evaluated by or approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA), or by any other agency. There are no plans to have this software so evaluated.

If you do not accept the above limitations, then you have no right to use this software.