Best licensing practices

TL;DR

This paper discusses the importance of licensing in open research, especially for astronomical software, highlighting community efforts and the need for formalization to promote openness and clarity.

Contribution

It summarizes community discussions and surveys on licensing practices for astronomical software, emphasizing the need for further formalization and standardization.

Findings

Community recognizes licensing as crucial for open science.

Many groups are working on formalizing software licensing.

Further efforts are needed to standardize licensing practices.

Abstract

The principle that research output should be open has, in recent years, been in-creasingly applied to data and software. Licensing is a key aspect to openness. Navi-gating the landscape of open source licenses can lead to complex discussions.During ADASS XXIX in 2019 it became clear that several groupsworldwide areworking on formalising the licensing of software and other digital assets. In this article,we summarise a discussion we had at ADASS XXX on the application of licensesto astronomical scientific software, and summarise the questionnaire we distributed inpreparation. We conclude that this topic is considered relevant and interesting by manymembers of our community, and that it should be pursued further.