** Using WeBWorK **

Hi Greg,

This is a very timely question because it's something the project is in the process of clarifying.

First some background. You may already be familiar with this information, but I think there is wide interest in this question. First, there is a distinction to be made between the copyright and the license under which the copyright holder has made the content available. The copyright holder is the party whose right it is to set the terms of the distribution license.

Open source projects take a variety of approaches to this. For example, the Ubuntu contributor agreement requires contributors to assign copyright to Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, unless copyright is already held by a third party. Ubuntu then releases those contributions under the GPL license. This requirement was quite controversial when it came out.

The Fedora project takes an approach that I think is better, and which I think WeBWorK should emulate. They do not require contributors to assign copyright to the project or to Red Hat. Authors may retain copyright, or, in the case of work for hire, assign copyright to the sponsor of the work. However, Fedora will only accept contributions which are released under an open source license, and they give a variety of examples. I like this approach, and we would be very interested to hear others opinions about it. Here is the Fedora contributor's agreement:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal:Fedora_Project_Contributor_Agreement

A WeBWorK contributor's agreement does not exist, but there really should be one. In any case, that is for the future. Here is the present status:

1) The link you refer to is meant only to cover contributions to the WeBWorK wiki, not to cover the source code. So, it should say "contributions to the WeBWorK wiki", not "contributions to WeBWorK".

2) The webwork source code ships with the following license:

http://webwork.maa.org/viewvc/system/trunk/webwork2/LICENSE?view=markup

3) Regarding the NPL, until recently the status quo has been that the NPL problems are copyright their authors or the institution which sponsored the authoring of the problems. But, as a contribution to the WeBWorK project, are released under the same default license, the GPL. However, now that we have learned more about licenses, we believe that while the GPL is most appropriate for the code, the following Creative Commons is most appropriate for the content:

http://webwork.maa.org/viewvc/npl/trunk/NationalProblemLibrary/NPL_LICENSE.txt?view=markup

Again, this follows the practice of the Fedora project, and is intended to protect the creative work of our problem authors in a manner consistent with being an open source project. We consider this a "default license" which covers contributions which do not contain a license statement of their own. Copyright holders who wish to apply another open source license to their work may do so by putting a license statement in their NPL subdirectory.

So, I hope that answers your question. In short, yes you are welcome to use the problems in the NPL.

We would be interested to know what you and others think of our plans here.

The two main things that have provoked an interest in clarifying this - 3 counting your question ;-): We are close (we hope) to having installation packages for some linux distributions. If we hope for those to get accepted into those distributions, the copyright and licensing issue has to be nailed down, and (2) we are starting to get direct contributions to the npl from commercial publishers.

Hope this helps,
Jason