The role of universities in the "open content" world

Different types of "open"

Open source software

For open source software in general three major types of open source software licences can be identified:

1. GNU General Public License (GPL)
2. Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) license
3. GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL)

Roughly speaking, the GPL forces users to release all their changes to GPLed software, including the software they added "externally". The BSD does not impose any release of changes, but does not allow you to call the software your own. The LGPL is somewhere in between: it expects release of improvements, but you can use the software with any other piece of software in the same system.

GNU General Public License (GPL): Free speech as a moral duty

Richard Matthew Stallman
Richard Stallman at the University of Pittsburgh 2010
Born	March 16, 1953 (1953-03-16) New York City, New York, United States
Nationality	United States
Alma mater	Harvard University
Occupation	President of the Free Software Foundation
Known for	Free software movement, GNU, Emacs
Website	www.stallman.org

Richard Matthew Stallman was the first important American 'software freedom activist. In September 1983, he launched the GNU Project to create a free Unix-like operating system, and has been the project's lead architect and organizer. With the launch of the GNU Project, he initiated the free software movement; in October 1985 he founded the Free Software Foundation.

Stallman pioneered the concept of copyleft and he is the main author of several copyleft licenses including the GNU General Public License, the most widely used free software license.

The "reversed 'c' in a full circle" is the copyleft symbol. It is the copyright symbol mirrored. Unlike the copyright symbol, it has no legal meaning.

Copyleft is a play on the word copyright to describe the practice of using copyright law to offer the right to distribute copies and modified versions of a work and requiring that the same rights be preserved in modified versions of the work. In other words, copyleft is a general method for making a program (or other work) free, and requiring all modified and extended versions of the program to be free as well.

Copyleft licenses are sometimes referred to as "viral licenses" because any works derived from a copyleft work must themselves be copyleft when distributed (and thus they exhibit a viral phenomenon). The term 'General Public Virus', or 'GNU Public Virus' (GPV), has a long history on the Internet, dating back to shortly after the GPL was first conceived.

Stallman argues that software users should have the freedom to share with their neighbour and to be able to study and make changes to the software that they use. He maintains that attempts by proprietary software vendors to prohibit these acts are antisocial and unethical. The phrase "software wants to be free" is often incorrectly attributed to him, and Stallman argues that this is a misstatement of his philosophy. He argues that freedom is vital for the sake of users and society as a moral value, and not merely for pragmatic reasons such as possibly developing technically superior software.

Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) license: Free speech as a pragmatic choice

BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses. The original license was used for the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), a Unix-like operating system after which it is named. The licenses have fewer restrictions on distribution compared to other free software licenses such as the [wikipedia:GNU General Public License|GNU General Public License]] or even the default restrictions provided by copyright, putting works licensed under them relatively closer to the public domain.

While the original license is sometimes referred to as "BSD-old", the most frequently used 3-clause version is sometimes referred to by "BSD-new. In fact, this version has been vetted as an Open source license by the OSI as the "New BSD License" and is referred to by the Free Software Foundation as the Modified BSD License to distinguish it from the original BSD license, and also states that, unlike the original BSD license, it is compatible with the GNU GPL.

This version allows unlimited redistribution for any purpose as long as its copyright notices and the license's disclaimers of warranty are maintained'. The license also contains a clause restricting use of the names of contributors for endorsement of a derived work without specific permission.

New BSD License

Original author(s)	Regents of the University of California
Copyright	Public Domain
Release date	1999-07-22
OSI approved	Yes
GPL compatible	Yes
Copyleft	No

Copyright (c) <year>, <copyright holder>
All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
    * Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
      notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
    * Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
      notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
      documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
    * Neither the name of the <organization> nor the
      names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products
      derived from this software without specific prior written permission.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND
ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED
WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE
DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL <COPYRIGHT HOLDER> BE LIABLE FOR ANY
DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES
(INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES;
LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND
ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT
(INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS
SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

The permissive nature of the BSD license allows companies to distribute derived products as proprietary software without exposing source code and sometimes intellectual property to competitors. Searching for strings containing "University of California, Berkeley" in the documentation of products, in the static data sections of binaries and ROMs, or as part of other information about a software program, will often show BSD code has been used. This permissiveness also makes BSD code suitable for use in open source products, and the license is compatible with many other open source licenses. The permissive nature of the BSD license also allows derivative works of code released originally under the BSD license to become less permissive with time.

GNU Lesser General Public License : A compromise between GPL and BSD

GNU Lesser General Public License

File:GNU Lesser General Public License 3 Logo.svg The GNU LGPLv3 logo
Original author(s)	Free Software Foundation
Copyright	Free Software Foundation, Inc.
OSI approved	Yes
GPL compatible	Yes
Copyleft	Yes

The GNU Lesser General Public License (formerly the GNU Library General Public License) or LGPL is a free software license published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). It was designed as a compromise between the strong-copyleft GNU General Public License or GPL and permissive licenses such as the BSD licenses and the MIT License. The GNU Library General Public License (as the LGPL was originally named) was published in 1991, and was the version number 2 for parity with GPL version 2. The LGPL was revised in minor ways in the 2.1 point release, published in 1999, when it was renamed the GNU Lesser General Public License to reflect the FSF's position that not all libraries should use it. Version 3 of the LGPL was published in 2007 as a list of additional permissions applied to GPL version 3.

The LGPL places copyleft restrictions on the program itself but does not apply these restrictions to other software that merely links with the program. There are, however, certain other restrictions on this software.

The LGPL is primarily used for software libraries, although it is also used by some stand-alone applications, most notably Mozilla and OpenOffice.org and sometimes media as well.

K.U.Leuven as an "Open" university ?

Current open projects at K.U.Leuven

Open source software projects

Plone Website application Multiple project in OPTEC: K.U.Leuven Center of Excellence: Optimization in Engineering

• <a href="http://acadotoolkit.org/">ACADO Toolkit</a> - A Toolkit for Automatic Control and Dynamic Optimization (open-source), Boris Houska and Hans Joachim Ferreau (for C++ and Matlab).
• <a href="/optec/software/qpOASES">qpOASES</a> - Parametric Quadratic Programming for MPC (open-source), Hans Joachim Ferreau.
• <a href="http://www.esat.kuleuven.be/sista/lssvmlab/" target="_blank">LS-SVMlab</a> - a Least Squares Support Vector Machines toolbox.
  
• <a href="http://people.mech.kuleuven.be/~dversche/timeopt/timeopt.html">TimeOpt</a> - Time Optimal Robot Trajectory Planning (open-source), Diederik Verscheure.
• <a href="http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~karlm/glas/">GLAS</a> - Generic Linear Algebra Software (open-source), Karl Meerbergen.
• <a href="/optec/software/rdp">RDP</a> - Robust Dynamic Programming (open-source), Moritz Diehl and Jakob Björnberg.
• <a href="http://www.liftopt.org">LIFTOPT</a> - Nonlinear Optimization (open-source), Jan Albersmeyer.
• <a href="http://www.orocos.org">The Orocos Project</a> - Smarter control in robotics & automation! (open-source), Herman Bruyninckx and Peter Soetens.
• <a href="/optec/software/SCPCVX">SCPCVX</a>  - an interface for Sequential Convex Programming Methods (SCP) using the CVX package in Matlab.

• ACADO Toolkit - A Toolkit for Automatic Control and Dynamic Optimization (open-source), Boris Houska and Hans Joachim Ferreau (for C++ and Matlab).
• qpOASES - Parametric Quadratic Programming for MPC (open-source), Hans Joachim Ferreau.
• TimeOpt - Time Optimal Robot Trajectory Planning (open-source), Diederik Verscheure.
• GLAS - Generic Linear Algebra Software (open-source), Karl Meerbergen.
• RDP - Robust Dynamic Programming (open-source), Moritz Diehl and Jakob Björnberg.
• LIFTOPT - Nonlinear Optimization (open-source), Jan Albersmeyer.
• The Orocos Project - Smarter control in robotics & automation! (open-source), Herman Bruyninckx and Peter Soetens.

The Bioinformatics Research Group

• TOUCAN is a workbench for regulatory sequence analysis on metazoan genomes : comparative genomics, detection of significant transcription factor binding sites, and detection of cis-regulatory modules (combinations of binding sites) in sets of coexpressed/coregulated genes.

Open content projects

Faculty or Arts, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

• MultiCampus Open Educational Resources: the case of OER-HE

The Robotics is a free robotics textbook initiative (originally initiated by Euron), and to which I have made a lot of contributions. (This project is not further maintained, and its content is being migrated towards an open content repository, such as, maybe, the Wikipedia.)

Mission statement of K.U.Leuven

The Katholieke Universiteit Leuven is a Flemish University of Catholic signature with an international orientation. It has the legal status of a private institution. In it's mission statement mission statement it says: "Besides education and research, K.U.Leuven fulfils still other important tasks through its dedication to serving society. In a spirit of critical service, it places its expertise at the disposal of the government, of organizations and of industry. On the basis of its research results, it ensures the permanent education of its graduates in their professional lives". This mission statement clearly indicates that the the university is a society of 'learning people' that are collaborating in science to build up groundbraking and innovating knowledge and to apply this knowledge to the benefit of the society. I many cases the notion of society is reduced to the industry and technical devices assisting the society. This would lead to a short-term research vision with measurable performance and a high efficiency but results in a (public) university that only takes a part of the society into account.

Key performance Index

The complete mission statement (only in Dutch) indicates Key performance indicator (KPI) to monitor the input, process and result. Both quantitative as qualitative indicators are mentioned leading to better view on the policy.

The KPI to evaluate research are shown in the table below:

KPI of research	Mission statement	Open projects
Number of publications	Knowledge sharing with society	Open access/Content
Impact factor for each publication	Knowledge sharing with society	Open Access/Content
Number of citations	Knowledge sharing with society	Open Access/Content

The KPI to evaluate scientific service to the society are shown in the table below:

KPI	Mission statement	Open projects
Number of patents		Open access/Content
Number of spin-offs		Open Access/Content
Industrial revenue (in euros)		Open Access/Content

The KPI to evaluate academic education are shown in the table below:

KPI	Mission statement	Open projects
Number of master degrees delivered		Open access/Content
Number of Ph.D students		Open Access/Content