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Open-source, also
called Free Software, is a frequent mode used by IT Department to make
software available to third parties.
Statements
in Software
In 2003, a study was undertaken within the IT
department to review existing practices in terms of licensing of software,
compare licensing via bilateral agreement to licensing based on open source
principles and evaluate the various options for open source licensing (e.g.
GPL, LGPL, …). The study has identified three components of what we called
“Software Statements” which appear in published software, and have three
distinct functions. At CERN, these three components are sometimes mixed up
when software is published.
The
study proposed that in the future CERN considers separately these three
necessary components, and adopts the terminology below in order the reduce
confusion. They are:
-
Intellectual
Property Statement
Also called Copyright Statement,
it specifies who owns the copyright
-
Distribution Conditions
Also called "Distribution License",
they specify what are the rights and obligations of those who receive the
software.
-
Disclaimer
It specifies the liability and warranty
conditions.
Components two and three are often covered by what is called Publicly
Available Licenses or Open Source Licences.
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Publicly
available Open Source Licences
Dozens of models of Open Source licenses have been
developed by multiple sources (universities and academia such as the MIT;
industry such as Sun, AOL or Trolltech; not-for-profit organizations
such as the Free Software Foundation) and are made publicly available
for use by organizations wishing to publish their software, whilst retaining
the IPR..
The GPL and
LGPL licenses developed by the Free Software Foundation (as well as
variants of BSD License adapted by CERN to meet special requirements) are the most
frequent open source licenses used by IT to publish source software. Choice
of public license or version adapted for CERN is done after agreement with the
CERN legal service
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