ITK Release 4/Licensing

New License

• On January 2010
• The board of the Insight Software Consortium (ISC)
• voted for changing the license of
• The Insight Software Toolkit
  • from the BSD License
  • to the Apache 2.0 License.

The board voted to make the change effective starting with ITK version 4.0, and leave previous versions of ITK to maintain the license under which they were originally released.

Notation

The Principle

The method for applying the license to the toolkit was also modified in order to match the recommended practices of the Apache Foundation

The Details

Top Level Files

• A file named LICENSE is now at the top of the ITK source tree, containing the verbatim text of the Apache 2.0 License.
• A file named NOTICE is now at the top of the ITK source tree, containing a manifesto of the copyright and licenses of third party files that are distributed along with the toolkit, and/or section of code that have been integrated with the ITK toolkit.
  • For example, the copyright notice and license of: VTK, VXL, TargetJr, libjpeg, libpng.
  • This file was mostly formed from the "Copyright" file that the packagers of the Debian distribution of ITK carefully crafted after analyzing the content of ITK 3.16. It is of course possible that our new NOTICE file may contain errors and/or omissions, in which case, we encourage you to point them out to us so they can be promptly corrected.
• Files in the ITK/Copyright directory, are scheduled to be removed from the toolkit, given that their content has now been copied into the NOTICE file.

Web Site Changes

• TODO: We will be soon changing the license displayed in the itk.org web site, along with the clarification that the previous releases of ITK are still distributed under the licenses used at the time of their release.

File Header Changes

Following the recommended practices of the Apache Foundation

we propose to replace the current header that all ITK files have:

  /*=========================================================================
    Program:   Insight Segmentation & Registration Toolkit
    Module:    itkImage.h
    Language:  C++
    Date:      $Date$
    Version:   $Revision$
    Copyright (c) Insight Software Consortium. All rights reserved.
    See ITKCopyright.txt or http://www.itk.org/HTML/Copyright.htm for details.
       This software is distributed WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even
       the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR
       PURPOSE.  See the above copyright notices for more information.
  =========================================================================*/

with