The Educational Community License (ECL) is a free and open source license based on the Apache license (version 2.0) and created with the specific needs of the academic community in mind.
Version 2 of the ECL came out of the Licensing and Policy Summit held in October 2006 in Indianapolis, Indiana where members of the academic community came together to address the concerns of releasing software written at an academic institution under a free/open source license. Members of the summit included university attorneys, technology transfer officers, free/open source project leaders, and foundation representatives. In particular, representatives of the Sakai Project and Kuali Foundation were in attendance.
ECL version 2 was approved by the Open Source Initiative in the Summer of 2007, and the Free Software Foundation lists it as being a "GPL-Compatible Free Software License" that is compatible with version 3 of the GNU General Public License but not compatible with GPLv2. This means that a software developer can mix code from an ECLv2 licensed project and a GPLv3 licensed project but, due to license terms incompatibility, they are not allowed to mix code from a ECLv2 project and a GPLv2 project.
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