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Milestone 4 - Position Statement

DUE: Tuesday, April 29, 2025

For this milestone, you will take a position as to whether to use a permissive or copyleft license for a group-developed security software project. You will also recommend one of the specific licenses that you researched in previous milestones.

Page Contents

Paper Requirements

For Milestone 4, you will prepare a comprehensive but concise statement that:

  1. Takes a position on the use of a permissive or copyleft license for a piece of security software jointly developed by a hypothetical group of CCU students working together; and
  2. Recommends one of the licenses you described in Milestone 2 or Milestone 3 for the software application.

In taking your position and recommending a license, remember these considerations (reproduced from the Project Overview in Milestone 1):

  1. How will the choice of license impact the adoption of this software outside CCU?
  2. To what extent will students who created code as part of the software development effort be able to reuse their code in future career positions?
  3. To what extent will graduates of CCU be able to use code written by their classmates in college? For example, if 4 students all contributed equally to the security software but a highly desirable company only had 1 position available, what concerns would exist about that company potentially using code written by the 3 students that it didn’t hire?
  4. How will the choice of license affect other choices, like which libraries of existing code could be used when developing the application?

Note that you are not graded on the position that you take or the license that you recommend. Instead, I will be evaluating your statement against the following requirements and considering how well it addresses the question at hand. Please be sure to explain your recommendation as clearly as you can.

The length of your submission should be 4 pages, double spaced, in an 11 or 12 point font. I recommend initially writing around 5 pages of text and making a few revision passes to condense your writing into 4 pages. The page limit includes:

  1. A short title for your work,
  2. Your name,
  3. All section headers,
  4. All references.

For this milestone, your references should include anything that you used when making your decision, as well as a citation for the license you recommend (copy this reference from Milestone 2 or Milestone 3). You may cite Wikipedia articles for this milestone, and you may use any citation format that you prefer.

Submission Requirements

Export your finished paper into PDF format, and upload the PDF file as your submission to the Milestone 4 assignment activity in Moodle.

Assessment

This milestone supports the following Student Learning Outcomes:

  1. Recommend an open source software license for a collaboratively written piece of security software.
  2. Conduct research into current issues related to software licensing.