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Another guide for OSS licensing

A look into… GÉANT

Published on: 16/04/2024 Last update: 17/04/2024 News

GÉANT results from the collaboration of European National Research and Education Networks (NRENs). The project aims to deliver an information ecosystem of infrastructure and services to advance research, education, and innovation on a global scale.

The GÉANT Software Tools form a technology stack which supports the full software development life-cycle from requirements management via issue/task management to source code repository and through continuous integration and deployment service to binaries repository and production deployment. The stack includes Jira, Bamboo, Bitbucket, Sonarqube, Artifactory, QALab, Gitlab and other tools. 

Regarding open source licensing, GÉANT provides a Software licence selection and management guide, highlighting the significance and merits of open source software licensing, OSS conditions and multiple other aspects. It takes over the Joinup Licensing Assistant (JLA) analysis grid, which, when license choice exist, greatly facilitates the selection of the most appropriate licence aligned with the developers’ strategy and user community (what, according to the license, a licensee can, must or cannot do; the level of compatibility, support and legal context).

While all OSI certified licenses are allowed, the GÉANT IPR Policy strongly generally recommends the use of permissive licences. We presume that this recommendation is due to the desire to minimize the risks of incompatibility and to offer as much possibility as possible to reuse and combine the covered source code. However, to respect the principle that source code paid for with public money should remain public (even in the case of derivative works), permissive licenses offer no guarantee. On this point, the guide illustrates the particular place of the EUPL-1.2 license, which has the “copyleft” advantage to preserve the public nature of the covered code, while offering maximum compatibility with other licenses, without viral nature for freely combining and linking components licensed differently, but with coverage of all distribution modes, including remote distribution (SaaS).

GÉANT License panel

For more information: https://wiki.geant.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=725614690

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