License

There is a lot of debate on the internet about what open source means. PLOS Biology provides an easy to understand explanation of what open source and copyleft means. We agree and try to follow the principles explained here by adopting GNU's Copyleft framework. From that article:

“Source code is the human readable form of a computer programming language. “Open source” refers to licenses that require the source code be available to users, and that users be able to reuse, modify, and distribute the code [3]. Without access to source code, researchers cannot effectively inspect, understand, or manipulate the inner workings of a program. Source code availability is of increased importance in the context of scientific research, where peer review, reproducibility, and building upon prior work are integral to the advancement of science. Source code access helps researchers quickly identify and remedy bugs that might lead to spurious results and adapt programs or pieces of code to suit individual needs, and allows expert users to contribute to code development on an informal basis. An active open source user community participating in maintaining and improving the code base can free the original developer to concentrate on major enhancements or move on to other projects without sacrificing continued utility of the software.”

GNU's Copyleft framework guarantees continued open access to software and its source code. This is done by requiring, as a condition of the license, that any work derived from ISETCam be distributed under the same license terms as the ISETCam.

It is our intention to use the same framework for the other repositories (ISETBio, ISET3d and so forth) that work with ISETCam.

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The opensource.com definition.