We publish Briefing Notes covering a wide range of issues relating to open source software use and development.
Intellectual property rights (IPR), licensing and patents
- Open Source Development - An Introduction to Ownership and Licensing Issues
- Making your code available under an open source licence
- Can you contribute code to an open source project?
- App stores and openness
- Free and open source software in mobile devices
- Software Patents
- Free and open source software and your patents
- Dual Licensing as a business model
- Open Standards and Open Source
Licensing
- What kind of licence should I choose?
- Contributor Licence Agreements
- The Apache License v2 - An Overview
- Common Public Attribution License - An Overview
- Creative Commons and Open Content
- European Union Public Licence - An Overview
- The Eclipse Public License - An Overview
- The GNU General Public License v3 - An Overview
- GPL v3 - What’s New?
- GNU Affero General Public License v3 - An Overview
- The GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1 - An Overview
- The GNU General Public License v2 - An Overview
- The Mozilla Public Licence version 2 - An Overview
- The Mozilla Public License v 1.1 - An Overview
- The Modified BSD License - An Overview
Strategy and policy
Innovation
Sustainability
- Sustainable open source
- Planning for sustainability
- Software Sustainability Maturity Model
- Sustainability lessons for research infrastructure
- Open source and research infrastructure
- Free and open source software business and sustainability models
- The business of open source
Selection and procurement
- Decision factors for open source software procurement
- Top Tips for Selecting Open Source Software
- Reuse Readiness Rating
Funding
Building communities
- How to build an open source community
- Essential tools for running a community-led project
- A guide to participating in an open source software community
- Community lessons for research infrastructure
- Community source vs open source
- The community source development model
Open Development
- Avoiding abandon-ware: getting to grips with the open development method
- Meritocrats, cluebats and the open development method: an interview with Justin Erenkrantz
Governance
Open source software development
- What is version control? Why is it important for due diligence?
- Release management in open source software projects
- Best practice in release management for open source projects
- What is a software patch?
- Creating a project on SourceForge
- Roles in open source projects
- Open Source Leadership: Debian
- Project Catalogues and Project Descriptors using DOAP
- Is open source software insecure? An introduction to the issues