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jonathanglevine / openfdashinyapps

R Shiny apps that use openFDA data.
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How is this code licensed? #1

Open dbuijs opened 7 years ago

dbuijs commented 7 years ago

Would you be able to add a licence file to the repo, so we can tell how the code can be re-used?

I'm interested in adapting it to spontaneous drug event reports from other countries.

It's there a particular citation or attribution (other than to this repo of course) that you would like used?

jonathanglevine commented 7 years ago

Hi,

I wrote the software for FDA while I was an FDA employee working on the openFDA project, so it really “belongs” to openFDA. My hope has been they FDA will put it on an official FDA GitHub repository, with all appropriate legal stuff. I have contacted the openFDA team, and they are not sure how to license, but are investigating. You might try contacting the openFDA folks directly. The plan of course is to make it freely available because it is part of openFDA.

Do you have any thoughts on what a license might look like? The culture of the R community seems to be to ignore licensing for scripts.

Regards,

J.

On Jul 5, 2017, at 3:42 PM, dbuijs notifications@github.com wrote:

Would you be able to add a licence file to the repo, so we can tell how the code can be re-used?

I'm interested in adapting it to spontaneous drug event reports from other countries.

It's there a particular citation or attribution (other than to this repo of course) that you would like used?

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dbuijs commented 7 years ago

I don't know if the FDA has any particular concerns or interests for this project, but giving it an open source licence seems like it would help with implementing the US Federal Government's Source Code Policy.

GitHub makes it easy to apply a variety of different open source licences. Looking briefly at https://code.gov, it seems like HHS has previously released code under the Apache licence.

From my perspective, you're right, as long as I'm experimenting in a dev environment, I'm not too concerned unless someone has explicitly put restrictions on their code. But as soon as anything I've built on that code ends up in a system that others use, it becomes really important to document where the code came from and to ensure that any and all licence terms and conditions are respected.

You've also written some Shiny apps here that are fantastically useful, so I want to make sure you get the appropriate credit.