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Rexford, NY
Marcus D. Hanwell | Marcus leads the Open Chemistry project, developing open source tools for chemistry, bioinformatics, and materials science research. He completed an experimental PhD in Physics at the University of Sheffield, a Google Summer of Code developing Avogadro and Kalzium, and a postdoctoral fellowship combining experimental and computational chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh before moving to Kitware in late 2009. He is now a Technical Leader in the Scientific Computing group at Kitware, a member of the Blue Obelisk, blogs, @mhanwell on Twitter and is active on Google+. He is passionate about open science, open source and making sense of increasingly large scientific data to understand the world around us.
Authored Comments
Interesting, I also felt like the licensing was oversimplified/incorrect. An open source license (OSI-approved) is a superset that includes all (I think) "free" licenses. Free in this sense often refers to copyleft, and the requirement that any derivative be shared under the same license. Permissive open licenses usually make no such requirement, are often simpler legally as they do not need to be concerned with what a "derivative work" is, do not suffer from compatibility issues, and may well be preferable when you primary goal is sharing, dissemination, reuse. They almost always require attribution, and the most simplistic example is CC-BY versus CC-BY-SA.
The debate between free and open can get pretty charged, personally I began my open source work as an advocate for free, but find the simpler, more pragmatic (IMHO) approach of permissive licenses better. Projects are about much more than licensing, but this is a key choice as you start a new project. It is interesting to note that academic open access publishing seems to have largely settled on CC-BY (in the STEM fields at least), Figshare uses CC-BY for articles and CC0 for data. Best practices are being established in many fields as sharing data becomes easier. One of the most important messages around licensing is to use one, and second to use an existing one rather than create your own (or add arbitrary modifications).
It is so great to see activity in this area, I had been meaning to do some research on what was available. This is an exciting time when power production can be done in a more distributed fashion using renewable power sources, and seeing open source software to help make this happen is extremely encouraging!