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What to expect when open-sourcing CERN projects

Open-sourcing software, gateware and hardware comes with benefits and opportunities for contributions, but adds expectations from the community. This section gives you an overview of common challenges and opportunities when open-sourcing a project. If you are interested in running an open-source project, please refer to the appropriate section of Running an open-source project.

Increased Visibility and Recognition

By open-sourcing your project, you publish your work for everyone to see and benefit. This is a great opportunity to share your work with others and collaborate. You can engage with the community, your users and attract potential new developers and designers to the project.

Maintenance and Support

Once a project is open source, it is expected to allocate resources for ongoing maintenance and support. This includes addressing bug reports, reviewing, merging contributions, and ensuring the overall health of the project. Especially with contributions from short-term personnel, a clear succession plan should be established in case the main contributor leaves CERN. Content moderation of comments or code contributions could be required (see recommendations on Due diligence, and CERN code of conduct).

Use of proprietary tooling

Some of the tools you use for coding and deploying your applications, simulating and synthesising your gateware and designing your hardware may be proprietary. You should be mindful that some people outside CERN may not have access to these tools. Users may ask for changes in the tooling, libraries used or any other components not available to them, in order to be able to reproduce your work and contribute to the project. It is good to keep these possibilities in mind when estimating the maintenance effort.

Evolving Project Direction

Over time, and especially with multiple contributors, the project may evolve in directions you might not have anticipated. This includes contributions far beyond the devised scope, or conflicting contributions. As a project owner or maintainer you need to balance your own needs with those of the community, and in case of conflicts, remain flexible.

Open-sourcing involves legal considerations. We give guidance on important subjects such as Licensing and Copyright in the Recommendations section.

Risks and Dual use

As the project is publicly accessible, this could invite scrutiny in terms of copyright, use of other libraries, and general legal risks. This is described in more detail within the Due diligence section. One specific issue is the possibility of dual use. If you think the technology of the project could be used in industries such as military we recommend reaching out to the OSPO team or CERN KT to investigate on a per-project basis.