Legal Contract
Dataverse Network software is licensed under the Affero General Public License (a version of GPLv3). This license guarantees you the freedom to share, modify, and redistribute the program, and ensures that it remains free software for all users.
The license also guarantees that future versions of the software will remain free and owned by you and the community. Anyone who extends the software and distributes it, or uses it to provide a network-accessible service that you use, must make the source code for those extensions available to you (and give you a royalty-free license to use patents they have incorporated in their extensions, if any). Anyone sharing, modifying, or running the software also must make appropriate attribution to the Dataverse Network Project and its development team.
Social Contract
In return for the effort so many people put into the Dataverse Network Project, we appreciate if you would contribute back to this collective effort in one of these ways:
- If you like the Dataverse Network, please use it by citing data in publications according to our citation standards; sharing your research data through the Dataverse Network; establishing a dataverse on your web page (or installing your own Dataverse Network and allowing other Dataverse Networks to harvest from your installation metadata, and, when feasible, data); or linking to our Project homepage. We also appreciate if you would cite the Dataverse Network Project and our publications in your reports and publications, and tell others about the Project. The more people involved in these ways, the more we all are able to improve the software for everyone.
- If you think of a useful new feature that could improve the Dataverse Network, please suggest improvements, send us code to implement them, or sponsor the development of specific features with grants or gifts.
- If you find a problem, please report the issue so that we can fix it (or even better, send us a patch).
- Commerical profit-making ventures also are welcome to use Dataverse Network software in any way consistent with our licensing requirements. In addition, our Project team can help provide training and technical assistance in support of your commercial and development efforts, when feasible and when we judge that such help improves the general applicability of, or promotes, the overall Project. Support for the Project via grants of funds, coding assistance, or temporary personnel detailed to our team, make it easier for us to assist commercial efforts.