[SeasonOfDocs] licensing discussion

[Erin McKean]

Hi folks!

One of our action items from the past meeting was to discuss how to license
any templates or other content produced by the project.

For background, here's a list of CC licenses:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/
And here are software licenses (although I don't think that software
licenses are generally useful for templates we should probably have the
licensing discussion all in one go and since we may release tools/code that
would be better served by software licenses ....)
https://opensource.org/licenses

For templates, I think the discussion is "what do we want to enable?"
rather than "what do we want to prevent?" since bad actors are not noted
for their scrupulous attention to licensing details. :)

CC-0 or CC-BY would be the two most open licenses. I like CC-BY but CC-0
with a (polite, not binding) request for attribution would be fine by me,
too. FWIW, it is extremely difficult (to put it mildly) to use anything
AGPL-licensed at Google, so I would strongly prefer to use Apache or MIT
for any code/tools.

In any case, I think we should have a "how to attribute" section in our
metadocumentation  and also reach out to the CC people when we've got
something we want to share so that we can be included in their list of open
culture resources.

Other open questions:
 * what do other similar projects use for their licenses?
 * any other licenses on the no-go list? (e.g. NC-type licenses close off a
lot of possible users/contributors)
 * would we be incorporating content that would need SA-type licenses?
Would we SA individual tools/docs?

In responding, if you could please state either a clear preference or a
"anything's fine by me" we can try for a rough consensus quickly -- since
relicensing is problematic we probably need to have this decided before
anything substantial gets published.

Also I am NOT A LAWYER, just a copyright geek, so I would like to collect
questions and then take them to A Real Lawyer™️ for answers.

Thanks!

Erin

-- 
Erin McKean | Developer Relations Program Manager, Open Source Strategy |
emckean at google.com | she/her
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