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Research software licensing guide

Public Domain

CC0-icon

If you put software in the “Public Domain”, you cede all rights (the “copyright”) to the software and donate it to the world. This was the dominant mode of publishing research software from the beginning of research software into the 1990ies. Software developed by US federal employees has to be published in the Public Domain. Publishing research software into the Public Domain is still popular with researchers who do not want to have anything to do with legal issues and believe that research output should belong to humanity. Note: Technically this is not a “license” but rather a “waiver”. Also, technically, the corresponding concept in German law, “Gemeinfreiheit”, is not identical to the anglo-american “public domain”. For the matter at hand however, it should be ok to gloss over these differences.

🚀 Advantages

  • Maximum ease of re-use. Your software can be combined with any code and re-published under any conditions.
  • Escape from legal considerations and entanglements.
  • Compatible with reproducibility and transparency requirements of good scientific practice.

‼️Drawbacks

  • No legal requirement for (re-)users to credit you. While giving credit is a community-norm in academia, is is sometimes forgotten with regard to software. You can improve the situation by adding a reminder to the software distribution that you expect to be credited, and how (e.g. “cite my paper …”).
  • The software will be available for use you might consider freeloading, because it can easily be re-packaged, renamed and sold …

📝 How to apply

  1. 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. “Written in 2023 by Birgit Blühstreifen and Marcel Moorboden m.moorboden@repro-resear.ch”.
    2. Written in <YEAR> by <AUTHOR NAME(S)> <AUTHOR E-MAIL ADDRESS(ES)>
    

    [other author/contributor lines as appropriate]
    

    To the extent possible under law, the
    author(s) have dedicated all copyright and
    related and neighboring rights to this
    software to the public domain worldwide. This
    software is distributed without any warranty.
    

    You should have received a copy of the CC0 Public Domain
    Dedication along with this software. If not, see
    http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/.
  2. Include a file called COPYING containing the CC0 legalcode as plain text in the root directory of the distribution.

This recommendation was taken from the Creative Commons Wiki which is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.