[SeasonOfDocs] licensing discussion

[Cameron Shorter]

For those of you working at a company which may have an opinion on the
license selection we choose for TheGoodDocsProject, could you please reach
out to your legal department and ask them:
1. Do they have an opinion on which licenses we select?
2. Are they able to provide their opinion within a week or two?

I expect we will select one of the permissive licenses, probably CC0 for
media. I'm less opinionated about any code we create but suspect we would
adopt the license(s) of software projects we extend.

On Mon, 8 Jul 2019 at 05:52, Clarence Cromwell <clarencewcromwell at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
> I think CCO would work for the templates, which is where I'm most
> interested in contributing.
>
> I hope the templates can be used by corporate doc teams as well as
> open-source teams. I know next to nothing about licensing, but I think that
> would at least require the we allow commercial use without requiring
> share-alike licensing (which companies like mine would probably avoid).
>
> Clarence
>
>
>
> On Tue, Jul 2, 2019 at 2:47 PM Jennifer Rondeau <
> jennifer.rondeau at gmail.com> 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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>>> SeasonOfDocs at lists.osgeo.org
>>> 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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