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. 2012;8(7):e1002598.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002598. Epub 2012 Jul 26.

A quick guide to software licensing for the scientist-programmer

Andrew Morin  1 , Jennifer Urban, Piotr Sliz
Affiliations

A quick guide to software licensing for the scientist-programmer

Andrew Morin et al. PLoS Comput Biol. 2012.
No abstract available

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1. Example of FOSS license with “academic” style copyright statement.
The example shown is the entirety of a 2-Clause BSD license with copyright statement (at top, within quotes). The text of the license is in black. Red highlighted text is where the copyright holder applying the license inserts their specific information. Application of this and many FOSS licenses simply require that the text of the license be included (usually as “License.txt”) in the directory containing the distributed program binary and or source code.
Figure 2
Figure 2. Schematic representation of license directionality.
In general, permissively licensed code is forward compatible with any other license type. However, only permissive licenses, such as the BSD and MIT, can feed into other permissive licenses. Restrictive licenses like the GPL are backward compatible with themselves and permissive licenses, but must adopt the restrictive license from then on. Proprietary licenses can incorporate upstream permissively licensed code, but by definition are incompatible with any other downstream license. Grey represents actions that are not permitted without negotiating a separate license agreement with the rights owner.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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    1. Stodden V (2009) The legal framework for reproducible scientific research: licensing and copyright. Comput Sci Eng 11: 35–40 doi:10.1109/MCSE.2009.19. - DOI
    1. Open Source Initiative (n.d.) Open Source Initiative. Available: http://www.opensource.org/. Accessed 10 November 2011.
    1. Free Software Foundation (n.d.) Free Software Foundation website. Available: http://www.fsf.org/. Accessed 5 January 2012.
    1. Scacchi W (2007) Free/open source software development: recent research results and emerging opportunities. Proceedings of the 6th Joint Meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering; 3–7 September 2007; Dubrovnik, Croatia. New York: ACM Press. pp 459–468 doi:10.1145/1287624.1287689. - DOI

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