[License-discuss] license for code used for scientific results?

[Tzeng, Nigel H.]

Kevin,

You may not have the ability to litigate but your college does to some
degree.  Earlham likely also has some IP rules that you probably want to
be aware of.  Probably a good place to start is with your ITPC committee
who formulated your copyright policies a while back.  You also want to be
aware of any requirements of the grants funding the research.

Of course, don't do this without speaking to your advisor first. :)

In any case, if there is an existing community then following existing
community conventions is often the most neighborly thing to do...some
researchers are "protective" and don't respond well to "encouragement".

My recommendation is to pick an OSI license...either GPL or ECL v2.0 and
call it a day.  Of the two ECL is more geared toward the needs of a
research university with a set of accompanying contributor license
agreements.

Release your data and papers under one of the OpenData or CC
licenses...either permissive or share-alike.  Folks amenable to sharing
back will...but I've always been on the trusting side of the fence.  If
you don't believe there is any malicious withholding of code or data then
simply providing a good example may be enough.  Making it easier to share
is better than any legal "incentive" or "coercion".

Regards,

Nigel