May I suggest pointing your colleague at: http://choosealicense.com/
and in particular: http://choosealicense.com/no-license/ which has the following useful text: """ You’re under no obligation to choose a license and it’s your right not to include one with your code or project. But please note that opting out of open source licenses doesn’t mean you’re opting out of copyright law. You’ll have to check with your own legal counsel regarding your particular project, but generally speaking, the absence of a license means that default copyright laws apply. This means that you retain all rights to your source code and that nobody else may reproduce, distribute, or create derivative works from your work. Disallowing use of your code might not be what you intend by “no license.” An open-source license allows reuse of your code while maintaining copyright. If your goal is to explicitly opt-out of copyright protections, try a public domain dedication like the Unlicense or CC0. If you want to share your work with others, you must opt into it. Even in the absence of a license file, you may grant some rights in cases where you publish your source code to a site that requires accepting terms of service. For example, if you publish your source code in a public repository on GitHub, you have accepted the Terms of Service which do allow other GitHub users some rights. Specifically, you allow others to view and fork your repository. """ Regards, Sarah On Thu, Sep 3, 2015 at 4:59 PM, David LeBauer <[email protected]> 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 list > [email protected] > > http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org > -- Dr. Sarah Mount, Senior Lecturer, University of Wolverhampton website: http://www.snim2.org/ twitter: @snim2
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