Guidance and Resources

Purpose

1. Government agencies invest significantly in software development and often own the copyright in the software that they develop or that is developed for them. Public sharing and the licensing of this government-owned software under free and open source software licence terms has the potential to:

1. save agencies time and money, resulting in a more efficient use of scarce resources;
2. encourage open innovation on the part of both the public and private sectors;
3. contribute to economic growth, primarily through the private sector being able to leverage and support government investment in the software it openly releases for re-use;
4. contribute to the formation of trusted communities of users whose public and private sector members have common or similar goals or interests;
5. result in continuous and ongoing maintenance of the released software code through these communities of users in a way that may not be achievable by a single agency alone;
6. enable agencies to better align their operational and strategic activities with relevant aspects of the Government ICT Strategy 2015; and
7. in some cases, foster transparency — for those who can read software code — as to the methods or algorithms used for the creation or delivery of public data and services, thereby enabling critical analysis and potentially the provision of improvements back to the releasing agency.

2. This NZGOAL Software Extension (NZGOAL-SE) provides agencies with a means of realising this potential. It:

1. explains the legal and policy context that is relevant to agencies' open source licensing of software;
2. sets out a series of policy principles to guide agencies in their open sharing of software code;
3. advocates the use of particular open source software licences for this purpose; and
4. sets out a review and release process to guide agencies through the review of the software they propose to release for re-use, the purpose of which is to help agencies make decisions that are legally robust and practically useful.

Free and open source software and licences

3. For the purposes of NZGOAL-SE, free and open source software (FOSS) is software source code that is released on licence terms that grant others the freedom to use, copy, modify and distribute the software, for either non-commercial or commercial purposes, as long as they comply with the applicable licensing conditions. It is important to note the following:

1. the licensing conditions that users of the software need to comply with depend on the form of FOSS licence applied to the software;
2. "free" in FOSS refers to the granting of a set of "freedoms" or permissions usually only available to the copyright owner and arising from the bundle of property rights the owner has in its copyright work; and
3. there are several common phrases in use that refer to the same style of licensing, such as "free software", "free and open source software", "open source", "FOSS", "OSS" and "FLOSS". Depending on the context, NZGOAL-SE uses a combination of "free and open source software", "FOSS" and "open source", all with the same meaning referred to above.

4. There are two main forms of FOSS licence:

1. more permissive licences that confer broad freedoms and minimal obligations on those who wish to use, adapt and distribute the software (e.g., the MIT licence, the BSD licence and the Apache 2.0 licence); and
2. sharealike licences (also known as copyleft licences) that confer similar freedoms and require those who adapt the licensed software to license their adaptations with the same licence if they distribute them (e.g., the GNU General Public License, or GPL for short).

Approach and scope

5. NZGOAL-SE is an extension of, and is modelled in part on the approach to, the open licensing of government copyright works set out in the New Zealand Government Open Access and Licensing framework (NZGOAL). NZGOAL-SE is a self-contained extension or framework, rather than being part of the original NZGOAL framework, because certain considerations are different to those relating to open information and data. Incorporating both frameworks under a single roof would unduly complicate matters for agencies and others interested in the frameworks.

6. NZGOAL-SE is not concerned with the proprietary versus open source debate or with the considerations that agencies may wish to take into account when using existing open source for their own internal purposes.¹ Its sole focus is on the public release and open source licensing by agencies of software they own or are authorised to release and license.

Additional guidance notes

7. Additional guidance notes may be released over time which:

1. explore, in greater detail, some of the issues addressed or raised in NZGOAL-SE; or
2. address operational or technical issues which arise in practice.

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