Lessons from Open Source

# Overview

Many of the technical and social issues we uncover as we consider a toolkit have been dealt with by those working in the Open-Source world. We look at lessons from open-source developers here.

## Licenses

Some considerations:

• A commonly used open-source license, the GNU General Public License (GPL), is often vigorously avoided by private sector enterprises. A reason is that the GPL requires any code which uses GPL-licensed software to itself be GPL and open source. "It's hard to sell software which you must also release for free."

  • If significant participation from private sector entities is desired, alternative licenses such as the MIT or BSD might be considered.

• An open question is the type of license that one may want to use on "e-journal"-style contributions; that is, IPython or IJulia notebooks which produce and demonstrate the operation of some facet of code. The content of the notebook itself may be licensed differently from a code library. It was observed that "creative content" is often licensed under Creative Commons licenses.

## Important Questions

Key questions for open-source development:

• Licensing (see above)
• Getting people to contribute back
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• An extension of the above: how to handle support. "Having no clear 'support' channel can kill collaboration from new entrants quickly."
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• Who will act as the "core group" driving development
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