[SeasonOfDocs] licensing discussion

Felicity Brand felicitybrand at gmail.com
Wed Jul 3 14:23:11 PDT 2019


In the interest of getting a rough consensus, “anything’s fine by me”. :-)

> On 3 Jul 2019, at 9:36 pm, Cameron Shorter <cameron.shorter at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> For our templates, I'm in favour of "CC-0 with a (polite, not binding) request for attribution". I feel  there will be situations where enforcing attribution will be inappropriate. E.g.: A tweet or elevator pitch where every word counts.
> 
> Cameron
> 
>> On 3/7/19 7:46 am, Jennifer Rondeau wrote:
>> I'm fine with CC-0. 
>> 
>> FWIW, the Kubernetes docs license is CC-BY and the code license is Apache 2.0. We do not have an explicit code license in the docs repository, however, which has led to some occasional confusion when people want to use the docs with the example code. Example code isn't quite the same thing as what we intend to provide as code/tools -- but it's analogous enough that I offer the story as data to back the "let's be careful to license everything appropriately" approach.
>> 
>> And +1000 to a "how to attribute" section in our now nicely named metadocumentation. 
>> 
>>> On Tue, Jul 2, 2019 at 4:51 PM Erin McKean <emckean at google.com> wrote:
>>> 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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>>> https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/seasonofdocs
>> 
>> 
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> -- 
> Cameron Shorter
> Technology Demystifier
> Open Technologies and Geospatial Consultant
> 
> M +61 (0) 419 142 254
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