I'm currently too swamped to contribute, but if someone is interested, this blog post by Jake Vanderplas is a great resource for information about scientific software licensing:
http://www.astrobetter.com/blog/2014/03/10/the-whys-and-hows-of-licensing-scientific-code/ Good luck! On Thu, Sep 3, 2015 at 6:04 PM Greg Wilson <[email protected]> wrote: > 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 > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing > [email protected]http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org > > > -- > Dr. Greg Wilson | [email protected] > Software Carpentry | http://software-carpentry.org > > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > [email protected] > > http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org
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