This project is for the development and maintenance of a license for participation in research competitions.
Research results are most valuable if they can be reproduced independently. Experiments are most trustful if they can be replicated by other teams and in different environment. (We try to use the International Vocabulary of Metrology [http://www.bipm.org/en/publications/guides/vim.html].)
The following competitions require that the participating systems are available for replication and independent evaluation:
- International Competition on Software Testing
- International Competition on Software Verification
The jurys of the competitions have to evaluate that the participating systems come with appropriate licenses.
This can be a tedious job. Therefore, we would like to turn the action duty around
and require that the participating systems deliver an archive that is licensed under the conditions of the
license LICENSE.txt in this repository.
In the following, we explain the spirit behind the license for research and evaluation.
The purpose of research competitions is that researchers in academic and commercial environments can get on overview of the current state of the art in the research field.
The purpose of this license is to ensure that researchers are allowed to learn, experiment, and publish using the scientific method of comparative evaluation, which, for example, means that new software can be evaluated against existing software.
This leads to the following requirements of a license for research and evaluation:
By 'exact copy' we mean, for example, same SHA256 hash. The purpose of this wording is that it is not necessary for evaluation to distribute parts of the software, or to change the software. In fact, it is important that the exact same copy is used for replication studies and other evaluations.
The goal is comparative evaluation. The purpose of this wording is that it is not necessary to grant the right to sell the software, or to exploit the software to generate commercial revenue.
The purpose of public research is to gain new knowledge. Therefore, it is necessary to publish results that are obtained using the software in comparative evaluations.
The software systems that participate in competitions can be complex sysstems that are composed of many components, often licensed under different licenses. The licensor, not the competition jury, shall ensure that researchers can use the results and participating systems for their scientific work.