Educational Community License

[2] Version 2.0 of the ECL came out of the Licensing and Policy Summit[3] held in October 2006 in Indianapolis, Indiana where members of the academic community came together to address the concerns of releasing software written at an academic institution under a free/open source license.

Members of the summit included university attorneys, technology transfer officers, free/open source project leaders, and foundation representatives.

ECL version 2.0 was approved by the Open Source Initiative in the Summer of 2007, and the Free Software Foundation lists it as being a "GPL-Compatible Free Software License" that is compatible with version 3 of the GNU General Public License but not compatible with GPLv2.

EDUCAUSE (Ref 2 below) says of the ECL, "It is essentially the Apache 2.0 license with a modification of the patent language to make it workable for many colleges and universities."

Any patent license granted hereby with respect to contributions by an individual employed by an institution or organization is limited to patent claims where the individual that is the author of the Work is also the inventor of the patent claims licensed, and where the organization or institution has the right to grant such license under applicable grant and research funding agreements.