Page 163 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

SOFTWARE FOR LIFE CYCLE ASSESSMENT 147

There are many different open source licenses, most are listed at www.open
source.org. Main characteristics of open source licenses are:

1. The source code of the software is available to everyone, for free,
and
2. The license that accompanies every distributed file of software
recognises the originator of the code, and provides a mechanism
to further ensure the open source "nature" of the file.

There are more specific requirements, www.opensource.org contains a full
list and explanations. Licenses that do not fulfil these requirements cannot be
called open source licenses.
openLCA, by GreenDeltaTC, is an open source LCA software [openLCA
2012]. Start was announced end of 2006 [Ciroth 2006], and a first version has
been released in September 2008. Meanwhile the sixth releases is available,
at www.sourceforge.net/projects/openlca. With more than 4,500 downloads
5
in 2011 alone , most from the USA, France, and Germany, but overall from 70
countries, it is internationally used.
Open source approaches provide several advantages to software users:
First, the software is free to use; second, it is fully transparent, and third, it can
be updated and modified by anyone, not only by the original creator. The last
point makes users more independent from the software provider. The software
is available and can be updated even if the original creator has lost interest. For
the creator of the software, a broad range of other open source software pack-
ages is available that can be combined or adapted to fit to the own software;
this allows building a more mature and feature-rich software comparatively
fast.
Although open source software is provided for free to users, it can be a via-
ble business model for the software creator [Ciroth 2008]: The benefit of avail-
able other open source software that can be integrated and reused, an existing
infrastructure for distributing open source software, and a more quickly grow-
ing user base (with requests for additional features, tailored versions, or sim-
ply training) can outweigh the license fees.

612 A General LCA Tools versus Specialised Tools versus Add-Ons
The purpose of LCA software may be quite different; on the one side, there are
full LCA modeling systems that offer users all features required for performing
complete LCA case studies. These are the main focus of this paper, and will be
investigated later more in detail.

5 http://sourceforge.net/projects/openlca/files/openlca_framework/stats/map?dates= 2011-
01-01 %20to%202011-12-31