Developer:Licensing

Introduction

We intend the myExperiment software and services to be reusable by the developer community and for the community to be able to share and contribute code. Much of the development outside the core myExperiment team is building over the API or SPARQL endpoint, and we share information about these activities via our developer pages on the Wiki. We also support the developer community working on the myExperiment codebase itself - the information about the licensing is presented below.

myExperiment source code

The myExperiment Ruby on Rails source code is at the myExperiment GitHub repository under the BSD 3-clause Licence.

The copyright of the myExperiment source code is jointly held by the University of Southampton, The University of Manchester and University of Oxford.

The myExperiment project is subject to a consortium agreement between University of Southampton and University of Manchester, which is administered in Southampton by David Woolley in Research and Innovation Services. Further development work was conducted under agreement with University of Oxford under the EPSRC e-Research South platform grant.

Contributor Licence Agreement

In order to accept 3rd party contributions to the codebase we will ask you to sign a Contributor Licence Agreement (CLA). The following explanation comes from the OSS-Watch site.

• A Contributor Licence Agreement (CLA) is required in order to accept third party contributions to an open development project, such as an open source software project. Such third parties do not automatically grant either the copyright of the contribution or a right to use the contribution as part of their employment contract. CLAs are also useful when a project starts life as a collaboration between two or more employers since this usually results in copyright being owned by multiple organisations.

• It can be useful to think of a CLA as being similar to a consortium agreement or a collaboration agreement. Such agreements define ownership of copyright in works produced in collaboration and, furthermore, they describe any licensing of specific copyright in materials generated by the project. However, a collaboration agreement may also detail financial and structural arrangements in the partnership whilst a CLA limits itself to addressing intellectual property rights (IPR) and is therefore more widely applicable. Furthermore, a CLA is, unlike a collaboration agreement, incremental. That is, it allows project contributors to join at any time by signing a copy of the CLA. A collaboration agreement, on the other hand, needs to be signed by all participants whenever it is changed.

For an example CLA, in use in the Taverna project, see the Taverna Contributors' Guide. Note that this agreement is currently under revision.

For further information about contributing code to myExperiment under a CLA please contact

• David De Roure david.deroure@oerc.ox.ac.uk