Open Licensing

DevelopSpace is committed to the open development of space, including distributing material in an open manner. We follow the Open Definition principles in defining openness, including that:

Open means anyone can freely access, use, modify, and share for any purpose (subject, at most, to requirements that preserve provenance and openness).

We see this openness as offering significant benefits for space development, helping to accelerate progress in a number of areas and broaden the awareness and support for the development of space. Open-sharing of information can increase the amount of review and feedback on on the provided information, and help faciltate others building on prior work rather than having to reinvent things that have been done before. Freely-accessible information also helps people from a wide variety of backgrounds learn about space science and engineering, and discover ways in which they can contribute.

This page describes the overarching license for content on our website, along with providing general guidance on selecting a license for new material and projects.

DevelopSpace Content

Unless otherwise specified, all content on DevelopSpace.org is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-BY-4.0). A copy of the license text is available here. This license enables reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, so long as attribution is given to the creator. Attribution can be provided by linking to the relevant page on DevelopSpace.org.

User contributed content can have an altenative license, see further information below. If no alternative license is specified the content is contributed according to the CC-BY-4.0 license. Please be aware of and appropriately capture the license status of any third-party content being added to our site, including the specific Creative Commons license (there are several) if the content uses one of them. We also host works that are in the public domain rather than being licensed, including works of the United States government.

Content on wiki.developspace.net was publicly posted however not explicitly licensed. Contact us if you want to reproduce any of the content and we can help with appropriate permissions.

License information for software source code is captured in the respective software files.

Selecting a License

There are a large number of open source and open content licenses available, see for example lists from GitHub’s Choose a License project, the Free Software Foundation, and the Open Source Initiative. This section tries to provide high-level guidance on selecting a license, noting that there are several pros and cons to various licenses and we do not provide legal advice. Feel free to contact us to discuss any of these matters.

A key distinction within open licenses is whether or not derivatives need to be licensed under the same or similar license as the work from which they are derived. Licenses without such requirements are typically considered “permissive”, while those with such restrictions are often described as “share-alike”, “reciprocal”, or “copyleft” (reversing the idea of copyright). Some licenses also cover patents for the subject work, while others do not.

Note that some licenses don’t meet the definitions of free- or open-licenses as they prevent modifications (such as having a “no-derivatives” clause) or prevent use for certain purposes (such as including a “non-commercial” clause). While we allow existing content to be shared on DevelopSpace under such licenses we generally discourage the creation of new content using them, with the exception of the use of “no-derivatives” licenses for content which is primarily stating an opinion and isn’t intended to be built upon.

The license identifiers on this page are based on the SPDX License List, which provides a standardized way of referring to licenses.

Documents, Data, Media and Other Content

Creative Commons created a set of licenses and a public domain dedication to allow for the open sharing of creative works protected by copyright. We generally recommend the Creative Commons By-Attribution CC-BY-4.0 license as a permissive license which still calls for attribution and is the base license for content on DevelopSpace.org. If no attribution is desired and you want to minimize restrictions, the Creative Commons CC0-1.0 public domain dedication can be used. Alternatively, if you want attribution and for modifications to be shared under the same license, you can use the Creative Commons By-Attribution, Share-Alike CC-BY-SA-4.0 license, which is the primary license used by Wikipedia.

Additional information:

Software

The vast majority of open licenses are targetted at software development, including many project-specific licenses. Organizations such as the Free Software Foundation and Open Source Initiative have worked to communicating the benefits and drawbacks of various licenses and to standardize the use of open licenses.

For DevelopSpace projects, we recommend the Apache Public License 2.0 (Apache-2.0) as a permissive license or the GNU General Public License version 3 or later (GPL-3.0-or-later) for a strong copyleft (reciprocal) license, both of which address copyright and patents. The MIT License (MIT, sometimes called Expat) is a simple, permissive license although only it covers copyright matters and not patents.

Additional information:

Hardware

Many open source hardware projects use one or more of the licenses described above. The Arduino project uses the CC-BY-SA-4.0 license for its hardware, as an example, while other projects use GPL-3.0 or Apache-2.0 licenses.

A number of hardware-specific licenses have also been developed. The Solderpad Hardware License v2.1 exception to the Apache 2.0 license improves its coverage for hardware (Apache-2.0 WITH SHL-2.1), while maintaining its permissive nature. CERN has developed a series of open hardware licenses ranging from permissive (CERN-OHL-P-2.0) to strongly reciprocal (CERN-OHL-S-2.0).

Additional information: