Oral Abstract

Oral Contribution (O3.6) Yan Grange (ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy)

Theme: Evolution of software development and management

The struggle towards an open source policy

Openness of research results is a topic that gets more and more attention from funding agencies and scientific policy makers. This means that institutes will need to be more aware of the openness of their outputs, including the produced software. Also, the request to make software reusable and citable in its own respect is coming more and more from the community.
In the Open Source Jungle, choosing the right license can be a walk through a minefield. Most programmers have either a very strong opinion, or do not even want to be bothered about it. To create some order in this chaos, ASTRON formed an open source committee to pick a license based on the requirements imposed on us by the Dutch scientific funding agency NWO.
In this talk we will lead you through the process we went through of picking a license and the decisions that we deemed relevant for our policy and how to present it to the employees in a way to convey this message to a group of people who rather write software than think about applying a license to it.