Open Source Software Licensing Workshop for Software Developers

Building Sustainable Software Projects by Using Good licensing Practices

Open source software (OSS) is broadly used in almost all software development projects in the GÉANT project, and so a good working knowledge of how open-source licenses work as well as understanding compliance and risks are crucial to securing your code.

The objective of this course is to enable software developers to contribute effectively to projects by – depending on the nature of the project – choose the most suitable Open Source Software (OSS) license and verify if there are any license incompatibilities.

What you will learn This course provides a practical dive into the open source licensing and compliance practices. The course is led by compliance experts: Andrew Katz and Alex Murphy from ORCRO Limited. By applying what you explore in this class, you will be able to:

• Apply general open-source licensing concepts subject to a permissive, copyleft or non-open-source licence
• Combine components under different licences into a single application.
• Select components for your project, based on the licence applicable and other criteria.
• Determine whether components under different licences are compatible based on a license matrix 
• Detecting incompatibilities and other issues using WhiteSource (now Mend) compliance tooling
• Apply criteria involved in selecting an out-licence for a project using both a manual selection process (using a component spreadsheet) and compliance tooling (WhiteSource – now Mend).

Course Overview

Who should attend

This course has been designed for software developers and engineers who are contributing to open-source projects and/or developing internal projects. It is also recommended to leaders responsible for the development tasks in the GÉANT project 

Pre-requisites

If you did not attend the Open-Source Software Licensing workshop earlier this year, you can find the recording and slides from that workshop on eAcademy. These will give you a good introduction to this practical class.

Training Dates & Location

23^rd November 09.30-15:00 CET
24^th November 09.30-12.00 CET

Delivery Method

Live Online Session:

Duration: 8 hours live online (over 2 days with short breaks)

Eligibility: This course is primarily open to contributors to the GÉANT project.

Please register on Indico: https://events.geant.org/event/1321/

Group size: Max 30 people

Programme

Day 1, 23 November 2022

9:30-9:45 – a review of the course aims, and an outline of topics covered
9:45 – 10:30 – a review of open source licensing concepts, and issues. Identifying licences.

10:30 – 10:40 Break

10:40 – 11:30 Licence incompatibility: practical examples. Introduction to a compatibility matrix, and how to use it.

11:30-11:40 Break

11:40 – 12:30 An introduction to Mend (WhiteSource) – licence identification,  compatibility review

12:30-12:45 Q&A

12:45- 13:45 – Break

13:45 – 14:00 Recap and quiz

14:00 – 14:45 Which out-licence to use? Considerations and issues

14:45 – 14:50 Quiz: which big tech projects are open source, and why?

14:50 – 15:00 Break

15:00 – 15:30 Quiz answers and discussion as practical examples on licence choice

Business case Preparation
The facilitator introduces a real life GÉANT business case the participants will use in the skills practice session on day 2.

Day 2, 24 November 2022

Skills practice session
In small groups, participants apply their knowledge, skills and tools to a real-life business case and receive feedback from the facilitator and other participants. 

9:30-9:45 – Recap of day one, and introduction to today’s course

9:45 -10:30 Practical exercise: reviewing sample code data to generate a licence list and determining a suitable out-licence

10:30-10:40 Break

10:40-11:30 Practical exercise: licence analysis using Mend (WhiteSource) and determining out-licence

11:30-12:00 Q&A, Recap and discussion

12:00 Course end