Licensing #1

andresailer · 2022-04-22T10:58:31Z

andresailer
Apr 22, 2022
Maintainer

need to decide on a license for key4hep repositories
Brought up by Wouter
One recommended license by HSF? -> Apache2 (MIT, BSD3, LGPL are also fine), avoid GPL (turns everything GPL)
For existing code we have to ask all contributors if they agree. (at least if there is a pre-existing licence)
For new code maybe github can help on fork (you have to agree to the licence)
"Someone" has to own the code for copyright reasons
- LHC experiments: copyright held by CERN for the profit of the experiments
- Key4hep is intended to be used for many experiments. Could have involved institutes as shared copyright holders (e.g. CERN, DESY, IHEP, BNL)
- Licence changes require agreement from copyright holders. Getting licence right makes copyright holder slightly less important
- What happens if institutes / experiments join in the future?
- Legal implications of having shared copyrights? Does this need contracts, or "complicated" agreements?
Check with relevant people in institutes
Define who are copyright holders (once policies are clear)
Decide on licence (once copyright holders are decided)
- Make sure things in the stack are compatible with the chosen one (Apache2 should be able to handle majority here)
- podio is GPL at the moment -> switch to a more permissive
- iLCSoft is GPL at the moment
- "licence dependency graph"

andresailer · 2022-04-26T11:34:22Z

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