LCO is committed to being an open source organization. Except for a small number of cases (i.e. where we have to use independently licensed software) all of our software, electrical, and mechanical engineering is open source, although not all of it is distributed at this time.
Software Development
We have a few of projects which we have put into the public domain on GitHub.
Our open source code is licensed under GPL v3. If you contribute source code:
- We will guide and mentor your work, helping you to contribute usefully from day one.
- We will recognize your efforts on our website (and credit you in the code!).
- All code you write will be open and available to anybody.
- We will fully communicate what the expectations are, so you don't commit to more than you expect.
- You will help make LCO even better!
To get involved please contact Edward Gomez.
Science
Additionally all our science is open in a variety of ways:
- All education and outreach images and data are available immediately for anyone to view, download, and use (subject to a Creative Commons License, detailed in our Terms of Use).
- All our scientific data is open access after a proprietary period (in most cases this is 1 year). This allows the people who had the original ideas to publish their findings.
- We usually publish our scientific results in the public domain on the ArXiv, in addition to publishing in traditional journals.
Education & Outreach
We believe there should be no barriers for people with an interest in science being involved in our program.
- All of our education activities are open to being used under Creative Commons Licence (see Terms of Use).
- We aim to publish all of our education activities on the open access platform astroEDU.
- Although we have limited resources to support individuals, we will always try to introduce people to our education partner programs.
- We require all our Global Sky Partners to be inclusive in who they allow to be members.