Some tools listed on nitrc have license restrictions like:

"For-profit organizations and companies are explicitly prohibited from using this software for any purposes." That is, they are for academic use only.

Other tools require modifications to the tool to be licensed under the same terms as the tool itself (i.e. the GPL and other "reciprocal" licenses).

Currently it is hard to know if a tool has one of these restriction until you read the specific license. This confusion can lead to situations where researchers develop analysis techniques without fully appreciating the impact of their tool selection on their future options. For example, if you ever intend to work with a drug company on a clinical trial, you might need to pay royalties to the developers of some of the tools you use.

Some sites, like sourceforge and google code, only host projects with particular types of license (i.e. just open source licenses). NITRC explicitly allows many types of licenses, presumably in order to be able to accurately catalog the full scope of neuroimaging resources. I'm not objecting to that policy, but I think we need to make it easier for users to identify and understand the licenses of the various tools.

It would be nice if there were attributes on projects to group licenses into general categories to aid in searching for tools. Tools should be clearly labeled to indicate the type of license.

For me, the handy categories would be something like:

- BSD/MIT-style open source
- GPL-style open source
- Free for non-commercial use only
- Available by purchase only

-Steve

p.s. More information about software licenses:

http://www.rosenlaw.com/oslbook.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_li...

http://opensource.org/