The CURIOSS Community Resources spreadsheet lists all the resources referenced by our members in calls and activities. It provides a handy guide to relevant resources created by both CURIOSS members and other individuals and organizations in the academic open source ecosystem.
Open source licensing for researchers and students is a particularly popular theme within our community. This article highlights some of the resources included in our overall resources spreadsheet related to that topic. We hope it will be of use to others looking for academic open source resources.
CURIOSS Member Open Source Licensing Guides & Resources
The following licensing guides and resources have been created and shared by CURIOSS member OSPOs.
- Georgia Tech OSPO has created a number of OSS guides and resources to assist researchers, including a Guide to Releasing Open Source Software that includes high-level steps to open source your code.
- The OSPO at George Washington University has launched a Short Course on OSS Licensing for Research and Education. The course introduces researchers to the essentials of OSS licensing for research and educational purposes. It includes examples, activities, caution notes, warnings and practical guidelines, and covers edge cases such as collaborating with federal employees.
- Prof. Lorena Barba from George Washington University has also shared her slides “Essential Skills for Reproducible Research Computing” which include a short lecture on Open Licensing.
- Johns Hopkins University OSPO published an extensive FAQ on licensing open source software.
- In March 2023, many CURIOSS members gathered at an event in Trinity College Dublin to discuss “Open Source Innovation in Universities”. At that event, Cindy Chepanoske from Carnegie Mellon University gave a presentation on “Supporting Open Source Licensing”. The same event featured sessions from other CURIOSS members on related themes, you can find the full playlist here.
A number of CURIOSS member institutions have created diagrams or flow charts specifically covering OSS license choice:
- Carnegie Mellon University developed an Open Source License Comparison Grid to help researchers choose appropriate OSS licenses.
- Georgia Tech shared their Open Source Software Licensing Diagram to help assist researchers choose a license for new and derivative software
- The University of California published a chart outlining the levels of potential risk for various OSS licenses: Open Source Software (“OSS”) at University of California: Use and Redistribution of Modified & Unmodified OSS
Related Resources and Information
The following related articles, tools, videos, and other resources from the academic open source ecosystem have also been recommended by CURIOSS members:
- Many of our members’ license guides reference the excellent Choosealicense.com resource from GitHub.
- Helios Open published a blog post that provides a recap on their spotlight series session on Open Source, Tech Transfer & Commercialization and includes links to related presentation materials.
- The Turning Way’s Guide for Reproducible Research has a section on License Compatibility.
- Fossology is an open source license compliance software system and toolkit. The toolkit enables the running of licenses, copyright and export control scans from the command line.
Feedback
If you have feedback on any of the resources above, or know of other resources that would be of interest to the CURIOSS community, please do reach out to us at info@curioss.org to share your insights. We will share your feedback with the community, and include any resources that the community selects as being particularly useful for their OSPO team.