Publish with an open license

Requirements

All source code and documentation MUST be licensed such that it may be freely reusable, changeable and redistributable.

Tools

• Choose a license, a tool that guides you through the process of picking a license that suits you
• Joinup Licensing Assistant, helps comparing licenses or select them on various properties

Resources

• Animated video introduction to Creative Commons by Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand, that also explains the basic concept of free licenses.
• A Quick Guide to Software Licensing for the Scientist-Programmer
• Open source licenses: What, which, and why by Ars Technica explains with some nuance the difference between the most common licenses.

Software source code MUST be licensed under an OSI-approved or FSF Free/Libre license.

All source code MUST be published with a license file.

Contributors MUST NOT be required to transfer copyright of their contributions to the codebase.

This may be impossible for civil servants in some jurisdictions so if that is a requirement they are effectively prohibited from contributing.

All source code files in the codebase SHOULD include a copyright notice and a license header that are machine-readable.

Note that there are some competing standards regarding machine-readable license info:

• The Licensee tool is used by GitHub, GitLab, and others.
• The REUSE spec seems to conflict with Licensee becuase it “consciously and opinionatedly breaks from convention” by looking in the LICENSES directory for licenses named after their SPDX identifier and does not take in to account the COPYING or LICENSE files which are the common convention by overwhelming majority.

Can we find good real-world examples of navigating this?

Examples

• Curl is REUSE compliant

Having multiple licenses for different types of source code and documentation is OPTIONAL.

Examples

• Docusaurus is using MIT for code and CC BY 4.0 for documentation

Tools

• The license compability checker by Joinup can be used to see if two licenses are compatible with each other.

Further reading

• License Compatibility, by Free Software Foundation Europe is a short video giving an introduction to what to think about for code with different licenses.