Zitationsvorschlag
Lizenz (Kapitel)
Dieses Werk steht unter der Lizenz Creative Commons Namensnennung - Weitergabe unter gleichen Bedingungen 4.0 International.
Identifier (Buch)
Veröffentlicht
Licensing Research Software Made Easy: Introducing the License Checker Tool
Abstract: Developing research software involves decisions about software licenses. These decisions can get complicated, especially if the code to be licensed builds on already licensed components. The challenge is to select a license that both aligns with the project’s goals and remains compatible with predefined licenses. The License Checker helps to find an appropriate license by providing an overview of common open-source software licenses, by analysing existing code for license information and by providing information about the compatibility of these licenses. It builds on a license ontology and offers a webbased interface. Target groups are research software engineers that have a basic understanding about software licenses in general but no deeper knowledge about license compatibility. It can be used to check the compatibility of an arbitrary set of licenses, but does not handle licenses for other research artefacts than software. It offers functionality to extract licenses from existing code and analyses dependency files, but so far only for Python and Javascript. The License Checker is also not handling complex licensing situations and does not distinguish between linking against a dependency and integrating a dependency into the code for the compatibility check.
Keywords: Research Software, Open-Source Licenses, Software Licenses, License Ontology
