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Milestone 1 - Statement of Work

DUE: Tuesday, March 25, 2025

For this first milestone, you will learn about the purpose of this project and select licenses to evaluate in future milestones. You will also practice project planning skills and concise written communication skills.

Page Contents

Project Overview

The project topic for this offering of IST 669 concerns the licensing of collaboratively developed open source security software. For the purpose of this project, assume that a group of students at CCU will work together to implement some kind of novel security application. To reach a broad audience with this application, the software will be released under a license approved by the Open Source Initiative.

One of the first concerns with releasing software under an open source license is deciding which license to use. There are two main categories of open source licenses:

  1. Permissive licenses, which allow the source code of the application to be reused in software that is released under other licenses, even ones that aren’t open source; and
  2. Copyleft licenses, which typically require anyone who reuses the source code in another project to keep the same license as the original source code.

Various arguments exist for and against each type of license. Ultimately, your task by the end of the project is to determine whether a permissive license or a copyleft license would be better for this security application. You will also recommend a specific license. In making this decision, you will need to weigh some issues:

  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?

This project is broken into four separate milestones:

  1. For this first milestone, you will explore the differences between permissive and copyleft licenses, identify four examples of permissive license, identify four examples of copyleft license, and explain how you will complete the rest of the project.
  2. In Milestone 2, you will research and describe the four permissive licenses you identify in this milestone.
  3. In Milestone 3, you will research and describe the four copyleft licenses you identify in this milestone.
  4. Finally, you will take a position about the license type (and recommend one of the licenses you researched) in Milestone 4.

Paper Requirements

For Milestone 1, you will prepare a comprehensive but concise document that covers the following requirements:

  1. Explain the differences between permissive and copyleft licenses.
  2. Identify and list (but do not explain) 4 permissive licenses that have OSI approval.
  3. Identify and list (but do not explain) 4 copyleft licenses that have OSI approval.
  4. Explain how you will conduct research on the various licenses in future milestones.
  5. Explain how you will stay on track to deliver milestones by their respective due dates.

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 first milestone, concentrate on the following 5 references:

You MAY cite Wikipedia articles for this milestone. Any citation format is acceptable, although a simple list of footnotes will probably require the least amount of space.

Submission Requirements

Export your finished paper into PDF format, and upload the PDF file as your submission to the Milestone 1 assignment activity in Moodle.

I have instructions available for Saving a PDF in LibreOffice Writer and Saving a PDF in Word Online. Word Online is the version available through your CCU Microsoft 365 account, although I personally prefer LibreOffice.

Assessment

This milestone supports the following Student Learning Outcomes:

  1. Explain the difference between permissive open source licenses and copyleft licenses.
  2. Conduct research into current issues related to software licensing.