[OSGeo-UK] Software documentation licensing

[Jonathan Moules]

Hi Jo,
Personally I'd lean towards CC-0 but that's just because I prefer Public 
Domain and minimal bureaucracy.

I know there are organisations that don't even like full Public Domain 
and require some sort of written license - for example SQLite is fully 
Public Domain but you can "buy" a license for a (hefty!) chunk of change 
if your organisation requires it. Here's the page where you can purchase 
a license+"Warranty of Title" - it includes possible reasons folks may 
wish to do this:
https://www.hwaci.com/cgi-bin/license-step1

Cheers,
Jonathan

On 2019-07-08 16:37, Jonathan Moules wrote:
> Hi Jo,
> Personally I'd lean towards CC-0 but that's just because I prefer 
> Public Domain and minimal bureaucracy.
>
> I know there are organisations that don't even like full Public Domain 
> and require some sort of written license - for example SQLite is fully 
> Public Domain but you can "buy" a license for a (hefty!) chunk of 
> change if your organisation requires it. Here's the page where you can 
> purchase a license+"Warranty of Title" - it includes possible reasons 
> folks may wish to do this:
> https://www.hwaci.com/cgi-bin/license-step1
>
> Cheers,
> Jonathan
>
> On 2019-07-08 16:31, Jo Cook wrote:
>> Hi All,
>>
>> I'm after a wide spread of opinions about licensing of documentation
>> for the Google Season of Docs project that I'm working with OSGeo on.
>>
>> We're discussing which Creative Commons license we should use for
>> documentation templates. The general opinion is split between CC-0
>> (https://creativecommons.org/choose/zero/), which effectively equates
>> to Public Domain, and CC-By
>> (https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/licensing-types-examples/licensing-examples/#by) 
>>
>> which requires Attribution.
>>
>> Hypothetically, can anyone think of any scenarios where a commercial
>> company would not want to use either of these, or would choose one or
>> the other?
>>
>> No need to reply-all on this if you don't want, but if anyone at all
>> has any opinion on the matter or has come across documentation
>> licensing issues before, I'd love to hear about it. The more specific
>> the better, please!
>>
>> Thanks
>>
>> Jo
>>