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Research software licensing guide

Permissive licenses

MIT Logo Apache logo

“Permissive licenses” have gained a lot popularity since the 2010s, but not necessarily among researchers. The main practical difference, compared to the Public Domain, when applied to research software, is the legal requirement to give the original creator of the software credit in the form of a retained copyright statement when the software or derived works are re-distributed.

🚀 Advantages

  • Excellent ease of re-use. Your software can be combined with any code published under a common free-software license to create added value.
  • Compatible with reproducibility and transparency requirements of good scientific practice.
  • Legal requirement to credit the original author

‼️Drawbacks

  • The software will be available for use you might consider freeloading, because it can easily be re-packaged, renamed, re-licensed and sold …
  • The software can be “closed”, meaning that anybody can re-distribute it, or future versions of it, without the source code, thus making it unfit for use in scientific work.

There are a large number of licenses in this category but the two most popular ones should be sufficient to cover the vast majority of use cases:

MIT License (aka Expat License)

Features

  • Very short, easy understandable license text.

Apache 2.0 License

Features

  • Includes a “patent grant”. This means that a license is also granted for any patents that the software may incorporate. This is mainly interesting for commercial use of the software, where it reduces the business risk.

📝 How to apply

Include the following notice at the top of each file in the appropriate comment syntax. Replace <YEAR>, <AUTHOR NAME(S)>, <AUTHOR E-MAIL ADDRESS(ES)> with the actual values, e.g. ”Copyright © 2024, Institute for Reproducible Research, Birgit Blühstreifen, Marcel Moorboden, m.moorboden@repro-resear.ch”.

Copyright © <YEAR>, Institute for Reproducible Research, <AUTHOR NAME(S)>, <AUTHOR E-MAIL ADDRESS(ES)>


[other author/contributor lines as appropriate]


Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining
a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the
"Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including
without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish,
distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to
permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to
the following conditions:


The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.


THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND
NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE
LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION
OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION
WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.