Licensing and attribution

Licence, copyright, and IPR

All repositories contain a LICENSE.txt file at the top level. We cannot accept code that cannot be released under this licence.

All code contributions should contain this copyright header at the start:

ANTS

# (C) Crown Copyright, Met Office. All rights reserved.
#
# This file is part of ANTS and is released under the BSD 3-Clause license.
# See LICENSE.txt in the root of the repository for full licensing details.

UG-ANTS

# (C) Crown Copyright, Met Office. All rights reserved.
#
# This file is part of UG-ANTS and is released under the BSD 3-Clause license.
# See LICENSE.txt in the root of the repository for full licensing details.

ancillary-file-science

# (C) Crown Copyright, Met Office. All rights reserved.
#
# This file is part of ancillary-file-science and is released under the
# BSD 3-Clause license.
# See LICENSE.txt in the root of the repository for full licensing details.

ug-ancillary-file-science

# (C) Crown Copyright, Met Office. All rights reserved.
#
# This file is part of ug-ancillary-file-science and is released under the
# BSD 3-Clause license.
# See LICENSE.txt in the root of the repository for full licensing details.

ancillary-file-data-preparation

# (C) Crown Copyright, Met Office. All rights reserved.
#
# This file is part of ancillary-file-data-preparation and is released under the
# BSD 3-Clause license.
# See LICENSE.txt in the root of the repository for full licensing details.

For applications, it is acceptable to have the hashbang (i.e. #!/usr/bin/env python) before the copyright statement. No other code or comments should precede the copyright notice.

All contributors must agree to the contributor licence agreement (CLA) for each repository they contribute to. Each repository has a separate CLA, see the contributing guidance in the relevant repository for more detail.

Code contributions must not violate intellectual property rights. For example:

1. Check permissions before copying code from books, Stack Overflow (or similar sites), etc.

2. Check licenses on source materials used, and follow any attribution requirements.

3. Ensure that when using Generative AI tools, appropriate guardrails are in place and contributions have correct attribution. For Met Office contributors, this includes adhering to the Use of Generative AI policy. Contributors from other institutions should check if their institution has similar policies, and follow the local policy.

AI assistance and attribution

Code where Generative AI tools have been used needs to have clear attribution to meet the Met Office Generative AI policy. This includes attribution in the commit message and in each modified file. Any file where a modification has been made with Generative AI assistance must have a comment immediately before the module level docstring, containing:

# Some of the content of this file has been produced with the assistance of <Generative AI tool name>."

where <Generative AI tool name> should be replaced with the specific name of the tool such as <Institution Name> Github Copilot Enterprise (e.g. Met Office Github Copilot Enterprise), Github Copilot Personal, ChatGPT GPT-4, etc. For Met Office contributors, Met Office Github Copilot Enterprise is the only approved Generative AI tool.