REUSE goes to space!
The German Aerospace Center (DLR) has adopted the REUSE
specification in some of its projects. We have talked to Tobias
Schlauch, research software engineer at the DLR, about the role of Free
Software for research, innovation, and the importance of a clear
understanding and displaying of the legal information of software
projects. He highlights the special contributions that REUSE has to
offer for software development but also for research.
The REUSE initiative, started
by the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) makes licensing easy for
humans and machines alike. With REUSE, we solve a fundamental issue
that Free Software licensing has at the very source: what license is a
file licensed under, and who owns the copyright? A set of best
practices and the helper tool make the task of adding this legal
information in every single file of the project a simple practice.
The number of projects implementing REUSE in their workflows is
steadily increasing. This is the case for some projects of the German
Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt
e.V - DLR), which are now REUSE compliant. To learn more about the
state of Free Software at the DLR, the implementation of the FSFE’s
REUSE, and how research and software freedom intertwine, we interviewed
Tobias Schlauch.
Tobias is a research software engineer at the
Institute for Software
Technology at DLR since 2005. He currently serves as the
representative of the DLR
Software Engineering Initiative. In this position, he
organises the DLR research software community and coordinates the
DLR-wide application of software engineering methods, processes and
tools.
FSFE: Welcome Tobias, and thank you for taking
the time to let us know more about the work carried by DLR, especially
when it comes to Free Software and a proper licensing and copyright
displaying of such projects. Let’s start from the beginning, why is
software a core activity of the research carried out by
DLR?
Tobias Schlauch: DLR is a large
research organization in Germany with more than 10,000 employees which
are organized in 54 research institutes and facilities. Aeronautics,
space, energy, transport, and digitalisation are currently its main
research domains. Software development plays an important role in all
of them and is a driver of innovation.
Overall, you can find a
wide variety of developed software at DLR in terms of application
domain and required maturity level. For example, software is developed
to help investigating specific phenomena such as simulation of air flow
around flight configurations. Another typical use case is the
processing, analysis and visualization of scientific data. Moreover,
there are also teams developing software for critical space missions
such as control software of satellites.
FSFE: What role does
Free Software play within the research ecosystem at DLR? And what do
you think are the benefits that Free Software offers to such a
community?
Tobias Schlauch: Free Software is an
important basis for DLR’s software development efforts. There is likely
no software project which does not rely on at least one Free Software
library or uses a Free Software tool to aid in the process of software
development. Thus, Free Software helps us to rapidly try out new things
because we do not have to develop them from scratch. Besides these more
efficiency-related aspects, publishing Free Software in the research
domain helps to exchange knowledge inside a research community and
between different research communities. In this way, Free Software can
be a driver for innovation in research.
"Free Software is an important basis for DLR’s software development efforts.
There is likely no software project which does not rely on at least one
Free Software library or uses a Free Software tool to aid in the
process of software development".
FSFE: In research, reusability
is at the heart of the scientific process, yet it is still one of the
challenges in software development research. Why do you think this is
an issue at the moment, and what kind of measures is DLR taking to
tackle it? How can a tool like REUSE help with these efforts?
Tobias Schlauch: The use and reuse of software in
research has its specific challenges. Generally, a core aspect of
research is that you can validate and build upon the results of other
research groups. For example, you want to be able to take the
“ingredients” described in a scientific paper, such as data sets and
software, and get to the same results as the authors of the paper. This
kind of validation and reproduction of scientific results is a core
aspect of research. However, reproducibility has become more and more
challenging with the rise of computational research and has led to the
so-called reproducibility
crisis. For example, still too often it is not clear
which concrete version of a software has been used to achieve a
specific result or, even worse, the used data sets and software are not
available at all.
The movement towards Open
Science tries to address this problem by establishing
principles and practices to make research products such as software
openly available. In this context, the FAIR
principles provide guidance how to share research
products to enable reuse and reproducibility. Initially, the Open
Science community focused a lot on data but nowadays also software has
been more and more established as a research product. Thus, there is
also an interpretation of the FAIR principles for
software.
An important aspect of code reuse is
that you have a clear understanding about the licenses under which code
is provided. In this context, REUSE makes a
unique contribution by providing a practical standard for documenting
such information in a code repository while not reinventing the wheel.
In particular, REUSE addresses the problem of multiple licenses and
different copyright holders as it allows to precisely express such
information on a per-file level. Finally, REUSE offers really good tool
support which helps during the initial documentation
phase and the further development by offering a linting
functionality.
At DLR, we need to transfer these Open Science
related practices into the DLR context. This requires DLR-specific
policies and support activities to effectively enable our researchers
to publish research openly. The DLR software engineering initiative
provides this practical support in context of software development.
I.e., we foster the establishment of required tool infrastructure,
offer guidelines, training and consulting. For example, in context of
software publication, we offer a help desk which DLR researchers can
approach to ask questions with regard to Free Software and software
licenses. In addition, we also provide Free
Software guidelines to answer common questions with
regard to these topics.
FSFE: The DLR project -
CosmoScout
VR - has recently implemented the REUSE
specification. How did they arrive at that decision?
Tobias Schlauch: I approached them with the idea
and I did not have to be too convincing. They already recognized the
point that one single license for the whole repository does not feel
right. REUSE allows them to be precise and to make sure that they do
not accidentally miss an important aspect.
FSFE: Do you see the
potential of more DLR projects joining CosmoScout VR in becoming REUSE
compliant?
Tobias Schlauch: Yes, I think so.
Actually, there are already much more compliant code repositories out
there. But they do not necessarily use the current REUSE badge feature.
For example, we also provide our learning materials in Git repositories
which we made REUSE compliant. In addition, in the DLR institute I work
for, the Institute for Software Technology, we currently rebuild our
software publication process and REUSE is to become a standard tool in
it. However, I think that there is more room for adoption of REUSE on
the wider DLR level.
Bloque quote: “An approach such as REUSE
makes it much easier to follow an established good practice… I do not
have to think where to put a specific information such as the license
files as REUSE gives me clear advice. In addition, REUSE helps me to
check whether I accidentally missed something. Such tools are really,
really important because they bring a standard into practice.”
FSFE: One of your efforts within DLR has been educating and guiding
the DLR research software development community on how to properly
declare licensing and copyright information for their work. What would
you say to someone working in this field to encourage them to use Free
Software?
Tobias Schlauch: I think that many
researchers at DLR are already aware of Free Software and their
benefits. However, another part of our educational efforts is to ensure
that they are using them the “right” way. Thus, license compliance is
an important aspect here which also starts with raising awareness. For
example, by providing researchers small rules of thumb such as “Make
sure that the code you want to reuse has a clear license.” or “Make the
license a decision criterion when selecting a Free Software library”.
In addition, we also encourage our researchers to publish their own
developments as Free Software or, even better, contribute to existing
Free Software projects. In this area, there is still room for
improvement but we try to encourage them by pointing out the benefits
of open collaboration such as improved visibility, sustainability, and
quality of published software. Finally, when making your developed
research software available as Free Software, you also ensure that your
work is still available to you and the wider research community after
your contracts end and you head over to another research
organization.
FSFE: Are tools like REUSE key to educate and
guide the rest of the research software development community?
Tobias Schlauch:
Yes, I think so. An approach such as REUSE makes it much
easier to follow an established good practice. For example, I do not
have to think where to put a specific information such as the license
files as REUSE gives me clear advice. In addition, REUSE helps me to
check whether I accidentally missed something. Such tools are really,
really important because they bring a standard into practice.
FSFE: Indeed, DLR is not only adopting REUSE but also has
included it as a reference within its Free
Software guidelines. Is the DLR aiming
to including REUSE into its licensing policy as well? How do you think
this would benefit DLR and the research ecosystem as a
whole?
Tobias Schlauch: Yes, I think
that REUSE has a good chance to be included in our DLR policies with
regard to software publication. There are different activities planned,
for example, in context of the adoption of the Model
Policy on Sustainable Software at the Helmholtz Centers
at DLR. In close relation to this, we might already earlier update the
DLR Software
Engineering Guidelines and make REUSE the default way on
how to document license and copyright information. The effect in the
wider research community will take some time but I think that we can
reach a point where we finally have a clearer picture of the license
situation when reusing a software.
FSFE: If you could
improve/change something to bring the Free Software ecosystem and the
research community closer together, what would that be?
Tobias Schlauch: I would like to remove the fear of
researchers publishing their code as Free Software and to encourage
them to contribute to existing Free Software projects more often.
FSFE: Once again thank you very much, Tobias, for your insights and
for all the efforts you are leading within the DLR and the research
community.
Thanks to all our volunteers, contributors, and
supporters!
It is always a great opportunity to thank our
volunteers and external contributors to REUSE for their great work in
continuing improving the tool and documentation but also for keeping up
an ongoing and fruitful discussion regarding its specification.
The contribution of all our supporters also allows our continuing
work on REUSE as well as on all our activities. You can join them by
becoming a supporter, tell your friends how they can support our work
with a small donation. Your support enables our work!
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