Instructor guide

Basics

This is basically presented as-is - not much technical presentation is needed.

There are the following main acts:

• First section is about social coding and sharing code and motivation for sharing code with a discussion that licensing alone isn’t enough. If you want people to use your work, you need to do more to make your work easily reusable.

• Emphasis of the concept of derivative work and that everything is based on other things. And if your goal is citations, you want as many people using your work as possible, because then they can cite you.

• Overview of license types. There are many online resources, and the biggest question is permissive vs. weak copyleft vs. strong copyleft. The cake analogy for licenses is only linked and can be skipped and does not have to be discussed in detail.

• Then a brief section on code citations. It’s good if you manage to start a discussion around this topic.

• The “Sharing data” part is meant to bring awareness about FAIRness and Open Science and to show how DOIs can be obtained for Git repositories.

Hints

Before you begin, it’s worth thinking about some particular good or bad cases you know about from your experience.

• When have you lost access or not been able to use something because licensing wasn’t handled well.

• When did multiple ownership mess up your plans?

This talk used to be called “software licensing”. You could mention that to make it more interesting, we have adopted the current broader name, and our emphasis is not just licensing, but why licensing is needed.