Follow-up: Open Source Licensing

I'd like to say a thank you to everybody who commented and offered opinions on my recent post about licensing software we produce at Directgov Innovate. The number of responses, depth of thinking and level of detail is evidence, if any was needed, of the relevance of this debate. The conversation about open source software licensing within government is both resonant and relevant.

Many responses argue strongly for a particular type of licence. The debate appears to split between advocates of more permissive licences and the copyleft licences that require derivative works be published with the original licence intact.

Some advocate licensing work on a case-by-case basis, that the actual licence be relevant to the product in question, whether the code is a library, a full application and so on.

We are keen to keep the debate going so if you have an opinion to offer on open source licensing in government please do still comment, either here or on the original post. As a team we advocate the use of open source products alongside our proposals to release code as open source. All your comments about open source delivery models are more than welcome too.