As part of OSU Libraries & Press’s (OSULP) contribution to the land grant mission of the university, and as part of our faculty’s participation in the research process, we feel it is vital for us to deliberately contribute to the larger open source development community. Our involvement allows our work to have a demonstrable impact on the profession. Additionally, contribution to and participation in the larger open source community provides a sustainable model for development and maintenance of tools, which may be useful to other institutions.

At the start of the development of a new tool or plugin the Director of the Emerging Technologies & Services Department will lead a discussion with relevant parties to reach agreement on proper licensing for the project. Our default project licensing will be the GPL license, however each project is different and OSULP staff should be sure that the license we select makes sense for the project we’re developing.

If we’re contributing to a larger project with outside contributors, our license should be compatible with the license used by the larger group.

Assuming OSU Libraries & Press chooses an Open Source license, development will occur in a public venue. Therefore, as of May 2013, the decision is to use GitHub to facilitate Open Sources development. The location of our code repository should be modified as necessary.