Hi David,
Thanks for this - you're right, we should have included licenses in the
"Best Practices" paper, and we should talk about the "why" of licensing
in the novice Git lesson. Would you (or anyone else) like to take a
crack at doing that?
Cheers,
Greg
On 2015-09-03 4:59 PM, David LeBauer wrote:
Yesterday I downloaded some great software but couldn't find a
license. Notably, the link from the original publication had since
broken, but I could find a page with a .zip download of the source
code via google.
However, I did not find any license file, only a request for citation
in the user manual. I emailed the author about conditions for reuse,
and she replied "All we ask is that the original work is cited and the
URL of distribution is specified in any product that comes out of its
use."
I wanted to suggest that they adopt some best practices to facilitate
reuse - add a license file, port the code to github, and assign a doi
- even offer to do it.
But I also wanted to justify the value of adding a license. I thought
it was in the the lesson on open science, but could not find [1] it
there - the section on licenses begins "The first question is
licensing. Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of open license ..."
[2] I also don't see* any discussion of licenses in Wilson et al 2014
best practices for scientific computing [3].
I was pretty sure there are some principled motivations, such as a
license makes it easy for users to know and respect the author's
wishes. I'd add them to the lesson, but would appreciate if I missed
the section or if anyone had any suggestions.
Thanks in advance,
David
[1] by "find", I mean, can't find matches to my search string
[2] https://software-carpentry.org/v5/novice/git/04-open.html.
[3]
http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1001745
--
David LeBauer, PhD
Research Scientist, Carl Woese Institute for Genomic Biology
Fellow, National Center for Supercomputing Applications
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
1206 W. Gregory Drive
Urbana, IL 61801, U.S.A.
office: 217-300-0266 <tel:217-300-0266>
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Dr. Greg Wilson | [email protected]
Software Carpentry | http://software-carpentry.org
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