What to Expect

Open-sourcing software, hardware, and other research outputs comes with benefits and opportunities for contributions, but it also adds expectations from the community. This section gives an overview of common challenges and opportunities when open-sourcing a CERTH project.

Increased Visibility and Recognition

By open-sourcing your project, you publish your work for everyone to see and benefit from. This is an opportunity to share your work, collaborate, and engage with users and potential contributors (both inside and outside the academic and research community), and to attract new developers and designers to the project.

Maintenance and Support

Once a project is open source, it is expected to allocate resources for ongoing maintenance and support. This includes addressing bug reports, reviewing and merging contributions, and ensuring the overall health of the project. Especially with contributions from short-term personnel (PhD students, post-docs, project staff), a clear succession plan should be established in case the main contributor leaves CERTH. Content moderation of comments or code contributions may also be required.

Use of Proprietary Tooling

Some of the tools used for development, simulation, or hardware design may be proprietary or licence-restricted. People outside CERTH may not have access to these tools, and users may ask for changes in the tooling, libraries, or other components in order to reproduce your work and contribute to the project. It is good to keep these possibilities in mind when estimating the maintenance effort.

Evolving Project Direction

Over time, and especially with multiple contributors, the project may evolve in directions you might not have anticipated. This includes contributions far beyond the originally devised scope, or conflicting contributions. As a project owner or maintainer, you need to balance your own needs with those of the community, and in case of conflicts, remain flexible.

Risks and Dual Use

As the project is publicly accessible, this could invite scrutiny in terms of copyright, use of other libraries, and general legal risks. This is described in more detail within the Due Diligence section. One specific issue is the possibility of dual use. If the technology of the project could be used in sensitive industries such as defence, we recommend reaching out to the CERTH OSPO to investigate on a per-project basis.