In the meantime, I have been promoting open source throughout my University and encouraging other groups to release their software as open source too. Since the University was spending a lot of money on this lawyer, we thought it best to try to meet the needs of the other projects that the University would like to release. Due to various research group restrictions, patent right clauses were desired in some cases and not in others. Different groups had ideas for how they wished changes to be documented as well. Another concern with a university is about how widespread software could be distributed for "internal use" without needing to release the source externally. For example, some universities own partial interest in start-up companies that spawned from research at the university. In some cases you may want to allow sharing of modifications to these entities without forcing the changes to be released publicly; in other cases you may want to maximize the "openness" of the software and prohibit "widespread-internal" distributions of closed source modifications.
Seeing that the University of Victoria could gain more benefit from this license if we made it adaptable, that was the route we chose. We also had input from other universities about whether or not these features would meet their needs. We then added the jurisdictional option to allow other universities (or anyone else) to be able to use this license.
I hope this clears up the issue of why we are applying. We developed a license to meet our needs, which are not limited to a single project. We could have submitted several similar licenses with the adaptive clauses pre-set, but felt that this would just add needlessly to the group of existing licenses. We felt a more elegant solution was to have one license that our various research groups could use by simply modifying a few initial conditions.
--Carmen Leeming -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3
