A few months back, I posted a draft How We Work article on the Shuttleworth Foundation‘s open licensing strategy. The basic idea is that we want everything we do and fund to be under an open license. As my article says, this hasn’t always worked as we haven’t had a clear policy on the matter. Good news: now we do.

Andrew Rens and Karen Gabriels have polished off our Open Resources Statement of Principle. It says things like:

All Agreements entered into by the Foundation which include the
creation of resources shall ensure that the resources are open
resources, and shall record how the Intellectual Property in the
resources is owned and licensed.

and

Resources are open resources when they are available for revision,
translation, improvement and sharing under open licences, open
standards and in open formats, free of technical protection measures.

This will now flow into an update of our standard grant and consulting contracts, and generally guide us as we go forward. Great work, Andrew and Karen!

With the release of this policy, we’ve also finalized and polished my article on the topic of open licensing. It’s up on the Foundation site in both HTML and PDF.