Open Software Licensing – a discussion, 8.3.2022 (Aalto University)
Channel: Aalto Research Services
Date: 2022-06-17

00:00 What's a license and why is it so important?
01:55 Can you use openly available software that doesn't have a license?
04:35 If the copyright owner sends you unlicensed software/code upon request and doesn't specify a license, what can you do?
06:12 What if someone asks you to help fix their code? Is that an implied license?
07:31 Are you allowed to share the software/code with your research group?
09:38 Who owns the software/code when working in a university? What are you allowed to do with it?
13:40 How can you open (=publish) or commercialise your code (in Aalto University)?
15:51 What is the difference between publishing and commercialising your software?
18:00 What if someone makes their code open source without asking the department head?
20:00 When you leave the university, can you still use the code that you've written there?
20:57 Which open source license to use?
24:07 Can you double-license strong copyleft software?
25:03 What license do you recommend for academic projects?
25:46 Choosing a copyleft license vs. a more permissive open license
28:15 Should you use a more specialised license as opposed to the popular, common ones?
29:15 What license to choose for an academic project?
30:12 What if you put your code in the supplementary material of an article?
32:17 Are you allowed to run an unlicensed code as part of an article review process?
33:16 How to include license and copyright information in your files?
40:16 What are Contributor License Agreements (CLAs) for?
46:24 Contributing to code under an existing license
50:11 Contributing to code that doesn't have a license
53:48 Copyright protects form, not function. When is code original enough to have its own copyright?
56:00 Can submitting code to an unlicensed repository have negative effects on the submitter?
57:20 Unoriginal code is not protected by copyright
58:40 What if you build on code that has a custom license that doesn't say anything about derivatives but prohibits redistributing the code?
01:03:44 How can a company use material produced by researchers using software that is licensed for educational or research use?
01:08:52 Summary of the talk

A discussion on open software licensing with Staff Scientist Dr. Richard Darst and Senior Legal Counsel Maria Rehbinder from Aalto University. This session was a part of Aalto University's Spring 2022 Webinar Series on Research Data Management and Open Science.

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