This policy was developed at the Department of Computer Science, in conjunction with experts from Research and Innovation services (both the legal and commercialization sides) with the intention of serving the wider community.
After more research, we have learned that this policy is, in fact, de-facto applicable to all of Aalto, it is just extremely unclear that open source is actually allowed. Thus, this policy can be seen as best practices for all of Aalto. However, everyone (including CS) has more rights: one does not have to use this policy. You don't have to use an open source license. IP ownership may be in more limited hands, so that you need fewer agreements to release.
However, we strongly encourage you to use this policy anyway. If you use this, you know that you are safe and have all permissions to make open source, regardless of your particular funding situation. It also ensures that you make proper open source software, for maximum benefit and open science impact.
Researchers make at least three primary outputs: publications, software, and data. This policy aims to make openly releasing all types of work as straightforward the traditional academic publishing process.
This document describes the procedure for Aalto employees releasing the output of their work openly (open source software, data, and publications). Aalto University encourages openness. This policy covers only cases where work can clearly be released openly with no bureaucracy needed. It does not cover complex cases, such as commercial software, work related to inventions, complex partnership agreements, etc. The policy is voluntary, and provides a right to release openly, but does not require it or preclude any other university process. (Thus it's more of a guideline than a policy.) It only is relevant when the creator has an employment relationship with Aalto. If they don't (e.g. students), they own their own work unless there is some other agreement in place (e.g. their own funding contract, grant, etc). Still, they can use this same process with no extra bureaucracy needed.
We realize that this policy does not cover all cases. We aim to cover the 99% case, and existing processes are used for complicated cases. Aalto Innovation Services provides advice on both commercialization and open source release.
This policy is for public licensing only (one to many). You must go through Research and Innovation Services for anything involving a multi-party agreement.
The more people who see and build on our work, the more impact we can have. If this isn't enough, you get more citations and attention. While we can't require anything, we strongly encourage that all work is either made open source or taken through the commercialization process. If you don't know what to do, don't worry: they are not mutually exclusive. Proper open-source licensing can protect your ability to commercialize later. Talk to Innovation Services. They like open source, too, and will help you find the right balance. Anyway, if work matches the criteria in this policy, it probably has limited commercial potential anyway: what is more important is your own knowledge and skills that went into it.
You want to add a proper open source license to your work, rather than just putting code on some webpage. Without a license, others can not build on your code, making your impact limited. No one will build on you, and eventually your work rots and gets lost.
You always want to go through this process as soon as possible at the beginning of a project: if you don't, it becomes much harder to track everyone down.
You shouldn't release as open source (yet) if your work is intentionally commercial or contains patentable inventions. In these cases, contact Innovation Services. In the second case (patentable inventions), according to Finnish legislation you are actually required to report the invention to Innovation Services.
Intellectual property rights don't give you the right to do anything - they give you the right to block others from doing something. Thus, it is very important that you don't end up in a situation where others can block you, and that means thinking early.
Decide on a license as soon as possible. Once it goes into the repository, future contributors implicitly agree to it. Otherwise, you are stuck trying to find all past contributors and get their agreement.
Another common trap is non-open source friendly grants. Not many outright ban it, but some require permission from all partners, and if there are a lot then this becomes close to impossible. Ask in advance, but in the worst case it might be you just can't write software at the times you are paid by these projects!
Do these steps at the beginning of your project, not at the end!
Check if the work is covered under the "conditions for limited commercial potential" in the policy.
Choose a proper license to match your needs. See below for information. It must be open source, and you can not transfer any type of exclusive license away - Aalto keeps full right to future use.
Get the consent of all authors and their supervisors and/or funders. There are no particular requirements for this, the only need is proving it later in case a question ever arises. You should also make sure that your particular funding source/collaboration agreements don't have any further requirements on you. (For example, some grant agreements may say no GPL-type licenses without consent of all partners.) Your advisor (and Research and Innovation Services) can help you with this.
If you are funded by Aalto basic funding, you by default have permission. Same goes for other big public funding agencies (Academy, EU… but the grant can always override this).
If you are in services, follow your source of funding. At the very worst, whoever is responsible for your funding can decide, but it may be someone lower too.
You are responsible for making sure that you have the right to release your code. For example, that any other included software has compatible licenses.
Put a copyright license in the source repository. In the best case, each individual source file should list copyright and authors, but in practice if you don't do this it's not too much of a problem. Make sure that the license disclaims any warranty (almost all licenses will do this). After this, contributors implicitly consent to the license. If you have an important case, ask explicitly too. The important thing is that you have more evidence than the amount of scrutiny you might get (low in typical projects, will be higher if your project becomes more important).
This policy is seen as Aalto transferring the rights to you to release, not Aalto releasing itself (just the same as with publications). Release in your own name, but you can(+should) list your affiliations.
Make your code public if/when you want. No particular requirements here, but see below for best practices.
Any borderline or questionable cases should be handled by the existing innovation disclosure process.
You can't require that people cite you, but you can ask nicely. Make it easy to do this! Include the proper citations directly in the README. Make your code itself also citeable by publishing it somewhere (Github, Zenodo, …).
Put on a good hosting location and encourage contributions. For example, Github is the most popular these days, but there are plenty of others. Welcome contributions and bug reports, and build on them. Make yourself the hub of expertise of your knowledge and methods.
Under this policy, any Creative Commons, Open Source Initiative, and Free Software Foundation approved open source licenses are usable. However, you should not try to be creative, and use the most common license that serves your needs.
Use this nice site: https://choosealicense.com/. It contains everything you need to know, including what is here.
MIT for software which should be basically public domain, Apache 2.0 for larger almost-public domain things (the Apache license protects more against patent trolling). Anyone can use this for any purpose, including putting it in their own proprietary, non-open products.
GNU General Public License (GPL) ("v2 or any later version") for software which you may try to commercialize in the future. This license says that others can not make it closed-source without your consent. Others can use it for commercial purposes, but all derivative work must also be made open source - so you keep an advantage.
Lesser GNU General Public License (LGPL, GPL with classpath exception) type licenses. Suitable where the GPL would be appropriate but the software is a library. It can be embedded within other proprietary products, but the code itself must stay open.
The Affero GPL/LGPL. These get around the "webservice loophole": if your code is available via a webservice, the code running it must stay open.
CC-BY for other non-software output.
If you think you might want to commercialize in the future: ask innovation services and they'll help you release as open source now and preserve commercialization possibilities for the future.
For clarity, raw official text is separate from the guidance on this page. Current approvals: Department of Computer Science (2017-03-17).
Aalto IP guide: FI EN: contains evidence that this policy is applicable to all Aalto.