Role of industry?

[ivirshup]

There are a number of companies that use our tools, some of whom have expressed interest in helping out/ collaborating. How do we involve industry in this organization? Some questions:

• How do we make sure we're useful to industry? Do we specifically want industry representation in governance?
• Do we have a different set of rules for recognizing for profit organizations contributions?
• Do we want to pursue financial support from corporate entities? Is there a particular model we want to follow for this? Some examples
  • Python Software Foundation sponsors
  • Numpy sponsors and institutional partners
  • nf-core doesn't make a ton of distinction
  • Bioconductor has a sponsors list and job board for conferences
• Are there licensing considerations here? Do we want to enforce a consistent license across org repos?
  • nf-core uses MIT, we're kinda normalized on BSD-3. Is there a meaningful difference?

Very open to suggestions here.

[Zethson]

How do we make sure we're useful to industry? Do we specifically want industry representation in governance?

Think that contributing to open-source software has become more popular and some of the single-cell companies which use Scanpy would surely do so. But, if we want to encourage companies to contribute we should ensure that their desired features are maybe quickly discussed beforehand to ensure that both parties meet expectations. Industry managers may get angry if some dev spends 2 weeks implementing a feature and then we decline it. Maybe we need a policy for this?

Do we have a different set of rules for recognizing for profit organizations contributions?

Code contributions? No. Providing funding for us? Yes. Think some visibility for the partner is only fair then.

Are there licensing considerations here?

Think that the only tricky licenses are the GPL licenses. We should try to avoid them (although they have their place!).

Do we want to enforce a consistent license across org repos?

Yes. Some companies have to whitelist every license. If we have a common license across all projects the companies only have to do this once and not for 5 different licenses. Eases contributions.