NRAO/AUI Policy on Copyright of NRAO Software

It is the policy of Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI), that the copyright and licensing for all software created at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) allows the source code for that software to be freely distributed and modified. This policy is both to support the Observatory's mission in providing software which might be of use in new scientific contexts, and to acknowledge that the Observatory has gained great advantage from open source software and the best way to repay this debt is to contribute to the effort. This policy does not require you to distribute software intended for in-house work, although if it might be of general interest we encourage you to do so. This policy also does not result in any additional support burden: the software is to be made available only on an "as is" basis unless special arrangements are negotiated.

As a further policy, due to the familiarity of the Observatory with the Free Software Foundation's GNU General Public License (GPL), and with the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), these licenses are to be used. In both cases the line:

    Copyright (C) <year> Associated Universities, Inc. Washington DC, USA.
(where <year> is replaced with the appropriate year[s]) must be included in all source code at the beginning of the copyright statement.

Alternative licensing is possible (for example a BSD style license), but will require individual approval.

Exceptions to either policy require a waiver from the Associate Director for Data Management.

Tim Cornwell
Associate Director for Data Management
April 2, 2003

Modified on 2003-04-02 by Tim Cornwell