About Licensing OSET Institute or TrustTheVote Project Software

All OSET-supported research and development work results in open-source software.

For election jurisdictions adopting, adapting, and deploying this software for use in public elections and as part of a procurement for goods and services to implement an election administration or voting systems, the software is available via an OSI accredited open-source license, the OSET Public License (or OSET-PL), and is distributed via our public-access source code repository.

For all other uses of the software, such as on-going research and development, all software is available through the GPL.v3 license. The OSET-PL actually grants you alternative licensing depending on your requirements.

A very important feature of the OSET-PL is that if you are not a government organization attempting to use ElectOS software as part of a commercial acquisition of a certified voting system that incorporates this software, or you are not a commercial vendor in the ordinary course of business of providing elections technology goods or services, then ElectOS software may be acquired pursuant to the terms and conditions of the GPL.v3 license if you prefer.

Eventually portions of this software will be housed in a special repository capable of performing license managed distribution for officially federal or state certified versions of source code intended for deployment in commercially delivered voting systems (more on this below).

At the point the ElectOS voting system is ready for testing and certification, a new repository system will be launched, designed to provide for additional integrity assurance and protections to be reviewed by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission for the production version of the code base.  The development, experimentation and testing version of the code not intended to be integrated with production hardware will continue to be available through a less-restrictive means.  All of the code, regardless of the "sandbox" where it resides will always be available public inspection on at least a "read-only" basis.  More will be published about the production repository system as that point draws nearer.

The OSET-PL has what may be a unique mission among open-source licenses: to define the legal terms of use for software to be acquired by state and local government organizations engaged in conducting or supporting public elections. This is admittedly a narrow application of OSS licensing, but there is a unique situation involving local, county, and even State procurement regulations which require some terms and conditions in licensing where the most popular licensing vehicle, the GPL, will not suffice. 

The OSS licensing requirements of this narrow domain (elections jurisdictions acquiring digital technology) should not be conflated with the licensing of OSS to Federal agencies who operate under different procurement regulations that more easily support well-settled principles of broader OSS licensing.

Practically speaking, although anyone can acquire software works resulting from the R&D and education charter of the OSET Institute, or source code from the TrustTheVote Project, the typical licensee will be a State, county, or local elections jurisdiction — either directly, or indirectly through their chosen systems integration vendor.

To be sure, our preference would be to simply rely on a popular OSS licensing method (i.e., GPL.v3).  We developed the OSET-PL after extended careful consideration of the deployment realities in local governments.  We would not have taken the time (let alone money) to do so without a clear requirement from Stakeholder feedback.  

To learn more about the rationale for the OSET-PL, why it was necessary, and why it is based on the Mozilla Public License, please read our OSET Public License Rationale Document. 

For more information we have an "FAQ" available in PDF form here: OSET-PL FAQ .pdf

The OSET-PL version 2.1  is in force as of 07 December 2015 and supersedes all prior versions.

Pursuant to Section 11.2, you may distribute Covered Software under the terms of the version of the License under which you originally received the Covered Software, or under the terms of any subsequent version published by the license steward, the OSET Institute, Inc.  We've made additional refinements and improvements to language and meaning to properly express intent, thanks to the helpful guidance of the Open Source Initiative.

The license is available in PDF format, or Plain Text (ASCII) file.

Questions: Please contact "legal at osetinstitute dot org" 

Credits: The OSET-PL and the rationale document were developed by our licensing counsel Heather Meeker of Tech Law Partners, LLP and the OSET Legal department, who appreciate the assistance and review from several professionals in the open-source license community including the Open Source Initiative.