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palaeoware / trevosim

TREvoSim - The [Tr]ee [Evo]lutionary [Sim]ulator program
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Community guidelines: Licensing #12

Closed ms609 closed 4 days ago

ms609 commented 2 months ago

Re: https://github.com/openjournals/joss-reviews/issues/6722

The licensing is unclear. The "Repository Contribution" document linked from README.md stipulates that "All Palaeoware code is Copyright of the respective authors"; the "Copyright and License" section states "All TREvoSim code is copyright 2024 by Russell J. Garwood and Alan R.T. Spencer."; the documentation adds Mark D. Sutton.

This leaves it unclear who would own the copyright of contributed code, e.g. by a pull request. What would be the copyright status of a line of code contributed by User A and later modified by User B? Are you asking contributors to transfer their copyright; should pull request instructions include instructions to change the copyright information, and guidelines for what form of commit would qualify for inclusion in the copyright notice? It may be valuable to include a Contributor License Agreement to clarify the status of contributed code, and allow you to make future decisions about licensing.

I have found https://r-pkgs.org/license.html a useful introduction to some of these issues.

RussellGarwood commented 4 days ago

Thanks for these pointers, much aprpeciated! I have now standardised the copyright statments, followed the CLA approach you used in TreeTools (thanks for this!), and also added acknowledgements to contributions to the readme.md. I also took the opportunity to add a code of conduct to the repo contributors repository.