Abstract

Contributed Talk - Splinter E-Science

Tuesday, 19 September 2017, 15:20   (HS2)

Licensing of Open Source Projects

Streicher, Ole
Leibniz-Institut für Astrophysik Potsdam

Careful maintenance of the licenses for open source projects plays an important role for the distribution and long-term evolution of the software. This not only embraces the license selection for the own source code, but also license management for source code taken from elsewhere, and required third-party software. Wrong decisions here may significantly hinder the distribution of the package and create problems even after years of use. In this talk, I will give an overview on the licenses used for astronomy packages in Debian, their advantages and disadvantages. I will both discuss the licensing problems experienced during the packaging, and the efforts to solve them.