The announcement of an American competition for an open source hydrodynamic solver posed a conundrum for a French research laboratory with their own in-house hydrodynamic code. The LHEEA lab at École Centrale de Nantes (ECN) had been thinking of open-sourcing their code Nemoh for some time. Submitting Nemoh to NREL's OpenWARP competition would make it available to a wide audience, but this would come at a cost: ECN would effectively loose authorship of the code. It was decided to make Nemoh open source first, and then to submit it to OpenWARP.
This idea posed a couple of problems for NREL. Firstly, with Nemoh open source, any old cowboy could submit Nemoh as an entry to OpenWARP. Secondly, the type of open source licence that ECN had planned to attach to Nemoh was problematic.
