Projects that publish source code without a licence weaken the reusability of their code, warns Stefano Gentile, a copyright and trademark specialist working for the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC). Currently just 20 % of all projects published on GitHub, one of the most popular source code sharing platforms, have selected a licence for their work - down from about 60% in 2008, Gentile said, quoting numbers published in 2015 by GitHub.
Copyright is an exclusive right, and automatically applied. Irrespective of whether you want to enforce your rights in your IT solution, copyright protects it, said Gentile, speaking at the Sharing & Reuse Conference, in Lisbon (Portugal) on 29 March. “Making your code available on GitHub without a licence at best represents an intent from the copyright holder to show his code, so that others can study it and understand functionalities and structure.”, Gentile said. “However, you’re not sharing anything. A licence is a transposition into legal terms of the intention of the right holder. So when there is no licence, how can you know what the intentions of the right holder are?”
In Lisbon, Gentile presented a simplified categorisation of questions around open source dealt with by the JRC’s Central IP Service, including some basic advice on licensing. Most questions regarding open source can be broken down into three categories, Gentile said.
First, in the case of fully-fledged projects, such as application software, it makes sense to adopt a copyleft licence such as the EUPL, to disseminate the code. The copyleft licence will ensure that the self-standing system will remain open source even after third-party modifications, forking and any redistribution of the code. If you have more suitable options available, give preference to licences that are more widely used. All public administrations may use the solution and can contribute to the community.
Stubborn
The second case, when public administrations are contributing to a project, is the most tricky, said Gentile. Normally these projects already come with a licence strategy, so it makes no sense for a public administration to be stubborn and pick a different licence for their contributions. Introducing a different copyleft licence could generate cross-copyleft compatibility issues, which may cause your contributions to be ignored, to prevent licence conflicts. “In this case, either adopt the same licence, or use a permissive licence such as the MIT licence”, Gentile said.
The third case concerns those who write libraries and frameworks, code that can be reused by several projects. “If your goal is to maximise reuse, a strong copyleft is never a good choice”, Gentile said. “You want the widest possible adoption, so use a permissive licence, like the MIT, and not the GPL.” ”Alternatively, he said, public administrations may resort to so-called weak copyleft licences such as LGPL. If integrated by means of a link, this may not generate downstream obligations on the terms applied to the larger programme.
More information:
Presentation (video)
Presentation (PDF)
Sharing & Reuse Conference 2017