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

[Philip Brown]

2011/3/1 Maciej Bliziński <maciej at opencsw.org>

> 2011/3/1 Philip Brown <phil at bolthole.com>:
> >
> > 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.
>

glad to hear it.



>
> > (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.
>

I dont have a "timeframe" in mind; rather, more of a completeness goal.
If someone tomorrow comes up with a reasonably comprehensive comparison
between the choices, and no-one has anything further to add; it seems
reasonable we could probably proceed with a vote very shortly thereafter.

What you wrote below helps a lot in that reguard, Maciej. However, it's
missing a bit of comparative info, I think.
Perhaps we could convince William to talk more about why he recommends CDDL?


> 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.
>

I dont see this as going "against" the idea of policy team. I see
policy-team's purpose as two-fold:
1. straightening out minor points of pickiness in an optimal and timely
fashion
2. condensing and summarizing "Really Important Stuff" in a thorough
fashion, so that we can have a clean vote on it



> >
> > 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.
>

Huh.That's silly. Oh well, then substitute "BSD License" for "public
domain", then



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

Fair enough. Although you still did not explicitly state what you believe
the goals of the license should be, as concerns our documentation. I will
proceed with the assumption that you believe the goal is to have the most
amount of people be able to reuse our docs, as they see fit.



>
> 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.
>

Why not? The only reason I can imagine you saying that, would be "because
no-one else would want to use OUR policy documents". But that can't be it,
because if so, then having a license for something "no-one else would want
to use", is a waste of time.



>
> 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.



Personally, I dont like picking a choice merely because [it's popular, and I
dont understand the alternatives as well]. I prefer to increase my
understanding of the alternatives before making the choice.

Recalling conversations from "The Original OpenCSW meeting", there was some
interest in having our core framework scripts, etc. also be CDDL.
You seemed to say that, in your opinion, CDDL would not make so much sense
for documentation, but  it would make more sense to you, to have our
framework code be CDDL.
If we did do that, it would then be nicest to have everything use the same
license, would it not?

Contrariwise, if having different licenses for docs vs frameworks does not
matter to you;
BSD style license is much simpler, and shorter than GPL, so would seem to be
even better.
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