[csw-maintainers] [POLICY] opencsw-policy: The copyright notice

[Maciej Bliziński]

2011/3/1 Philip Brown <phil at bolthole.com>:
> So there we go. I validly reported "someone suggested a difference license".
> Now how about you answer my question of,
>  are "we 3" going to pay attention to those comments[both in this
> specific case,and in the general case], or just ignore them?
>
> Your prior message seemed to imply that since we are the people who
> formally volunteered for the policy board, we can ignore input from
> others.
> (In which case I would ask, why are we discussing policy issues on the
> maintainers list then?)
>
>
> My opinion is that we should pay attention to them, both in the
> specific, and the general case. What's your, and Maciej's opinion on
> this?

We are going to pay attention to comments from everyone.

> (For the "specific instance" . someone has raised the suggestion of an
> alternative license. there have been no discussions on relative merits
> of GPL vs CDDL.
> To just pick a license for our documentation, based on only the
> handful of people who have spoken up so far, that is going to apply
> for all our docs, for a Very Long Time, without any analysis of which,
> if any, is better... strikes me as.. rash.

What's your timeline for the licensing choice?  Keep in mind that this
issue blocks any further changes to our policy documents.

The license will not apply to all our docs.  It will apply to files
which make up our policy documentation, living in the code repository.
It will be only a fraction of our documentation.

The handful of people who have spoken are the ones who care.  Other
ones probably don't care about the license, as long as the policy is
there for them to read.

The idea behind policy team is to avoid exactly the problem you're
creating above: we want to stop worrying about what any maintainer
might think but doesn't say.  We want to go forward in a small team of
people who care, while allowing others to speak up when they want to.

If you want to go against the idea of policy-team in this case and ask
for everyone's opinion, we can do it in a systematic way by calling a
vote on the issue.

> PS; to address someone's comment of "what about if someone wants to
> 'use our documentation work' for future purposes and other
> projects"... there is also the possibility of simply making our
> documentation fully "public domain".
>
> So, possibilities that have been now mentioned are:
>
> a) none
> b) GPL
> c) CDDL
> d) public domain
>
> Anyone want to state *why* one is particularly better than the other
> choices, in their opinion?
>
> It would probably help to also state up front, what the perceived
> benefit of having a copyright notice is. The only one I have seen so
> far is, "[to clearly allow people to use our documentation for other
> projectsj]".
>
> If that is the only goal, then it seems we want to be as permissive as
> possible. The option that fits "most permissive" from the above list,
> is "public domain".

Public domain is not without problems.  It is a US-centric concept,
while our project needs to be considered in a larger context.  For
example, there are jurisdictions in which the notion of public domain
is not acknowledged[1], with unfortunate consequences.

The choice of "none" license is riddled with many of the same problems
as public domain.

If I understand correctly, CDDL was preferred by some for build
description license.  I think that the reasoning behind it was that a
commercial third party would be allowed to take our build
descriptions, modify them and distribute them without contributing
back to our project.  Fair enough.  However, in the case of policy
documents, CDDL does not offer any benefit of this kind to third
parties.

GPL is a well known and well understood license, certainly more known
and better understood than CDDL -- that's why it is my preferred
choice.  I believe that many others share my opinion.

Maciej

[1] http://warp.povusers.org/grrr/costly_open_source_licenses.html