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05B Licenses for government work

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Eli Holmes edited this page Apr 22, 2022 · 1 revision

Licenses

Work of the United States government that is done by US federal employees as part of their official duties is in the public domain within the United States of America and cannot be copyrighted. Code (or anything else) developed by US federal employees should have a notice that the work is in the public domain. Additionally it is common to waive copyright and related rights in the work worldwide through the CC0 1.0 Universal public domain dedication.

There are two main licenses used for products by federal agencies (or their employees) on GitHub: Creative Commons license (CC0-1.0) and the GNU General Public License v3. CC0-1.0 is a very broad declaration of public domain while GPL-3 is explicit about derivative works and how those works must retain an open source license.

Additional License information

In addition to one of the standard licenses above we also add the following addendum:

Software code created by U.S. Government employees is not subject to
copyright in the United States (17 U.S.C. §105). The United State
s/Department of Commerce reserve all rights to seek and obtain copyright
protection in countries other than the United States for Software authored
in its entirety by the Department of Commerce. To this end, the Department
of Commerce hereby grants to Recipient a royalty-free, nonexclusive license
to use, copy, and create derivative works of the Software outside of the
United States.

Specifying the license for an R package

  • At the base level of your package, add a LICENSE text file. See for example, US government work + CC0-1.0.
  • Then in your DESCRIPTION file, put the line
License: file LICENSE
  • What is in that LICENSE file? If you are using a standard license, like GPL-2 or GPL-3, then you put that license in the file. Search the internet for the text. But CRAN might complain if you do that and are submitting to CRAN. In that case, you could just do
License: GPL-2

Disclaimers

Besides the license, code from federal agencies should also have a disclaimer that the code is 'as is' and the user assumes responsibility for its use.

  • The Fisheries Integrated Toolbox has a Disclaimer for US Government products in its Resources repo.
  • The repos on the EPA organization use a few different (albeit similar) disclaimers. Generic, GitHub specific.
  • CISA repos have a bit of an ad hoc disclaimer.

Here is a standard disclaimer. Here tailored for a repository on GitHub.

This repository is a scientific product and is not official communication of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or the United States Department of Commerce. All NOAA GitHub project code is provided on an 'as is' basis and the user assumes responsibility for its use. Any claims against the Department of Commerce or Department of Commerce bureaus stemming from the use of this GitHub project will be governed by all applicable Federal law. Any reference to specific commercial products, processes, or services by service mark, trademark, manufacturer, or otherwise, does not constitute or imply their endorsement, recommendation or favoring by the Department of Commerce. The Department of Commerce seal and logo, or the seal and logo of a DOC bureau, shall not be used in any manner to imply endorsement of any commercial product or activity by DOC or the United States Government.

Creative Commons v1.0 Universal license

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