There is growing pressure in the scientific community, and in particular among scientist who heavily rely on computations, towards providing open access to the result of research. This is considered, on one hand, key to the production of reproducible science, and, on the other hand, it is seen as a way to improve the impact of the scientific results, by allowing other scientist to use these results in their own research, potentially leading to further progress. I would argue these are the basics of scientific research, but, unfortunately, it is too common to encounter journal articles which do not provide the required level of detail for a complete re-implementation of…
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OpenFOAM is open source, and will stay so
A few days ago, it was suggested to re-license the OpenFOAM® code, currently regulated by the GPL 3 license, under the Lesser General Public License (LGPL). The suggestion came from the leader of the -extend project (see comment 1 for a clarification), which is a community driven initiative, not associated with OpenCFD, the producers of OpenFOAM. The idea behind re-licensing is of increasing the number of users of the code, and to “free up” the code more. OpenCFD, who legally own the OpenFOAM trademark, stated their position on the topic today, with an article on their website, clarifying that their release will remain under the GPL license, and will never…