The next World Lunch will be a roundtable discussion on the use and benefits of long-term (software) repositories.
Organisations (usually specific employees) and authors of the program code are responsible for compliance with internal guidelines and are responsible for ensuring that all criteria necessary to license the software under an Open Source Licence are met. In particular, they are responsible for ensuring that no third party has rights to the software or part of the software that would prevent open source licensing. For example, if the code embedded in the software was developed during a project with an industrial partner or was developed by a third party.
This is often ‘delegated’ to legal officers, while there is a great deal of liability and risk of making mistakes about ownership. There is also a great commercial benefit in tracking property that can be offered for licensing and for sale.
For that reason, in some organisations, software must be registered in a repository even alongside the Github-like repository that researchers also use to distribute their code. In some organisations this repository is not used or its use is limited. Initiatives to implement it may have failed.
The roundtable will address learnings such as:
- Who uses such a repository?
- What exactly is it used for?
- How does it work? How does it not work?
- How to develop such a system?
- How to implement it?
