Re: Licensing: feedback wanted

I think by-sa is sufficient. The only commercial use it would limit is one
that would benefit a single person or company without any of that benefit
being shared back to the community. That's not consistent with our goal.
And by-sa still allows for plenty of great commercial uses.

Also, it would be consistent with MDN,
https://developer.mozilla.org/Project:Copyrights, meaning we can use
content from there without having to license it differently, and I think we
should have a single license for all our content, regardless of the
original source(s).

Now that I look again at the MDN copyright page, I'm reminded of what they
do with code samples, and we may want to consider doing the same. Notice
they require them to be public domain. One thing this does is it makes it
possible for anyone to take a code sample from our curriculum, even if its
3 lines of code, and use it anywhere, without having to have a comment
above the code that says where it came from, who owns the copyright, and
under which license it's used and distributed. As our goal is not to create
a giant library of source code (if it were, a code license would be
appropriate) but a giant curriculum of which parts are code samples (some
small, some large), I think this makes good sense. Also, CC licenses are
not really fitting to source code, and it would be I think more pain than
worth to license the source code differently (with a code license) than the
rest of the content.

In short, I think the MDN copyright page is a great reference.

- Richard

On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 7:36 AM, Chris Mills <cmills@opera.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Richard Worth quite rightly brought up the issue of licensing of the
> content on IRC.
>
> I have spoken to the Opera lawyers and worked out that it is all ok and
> legal for us to move the Opera web standards curriculum material over to
> the W3C and chance the license from by-sa-nc to remove the nc part - we
> don't want it to be non-commercial because there are lot of potential
> really good valid commercial uses of our content that we don't want to
> preclude it from.
>
> The question I would like ask to ask you for feedback on is this:
>
> shall we go with by-sa. or just by? I think by-sa is best, as I worry what
> would happen to our material if we didn't include SA. We want the material
> and any evolution of it to be open, surely?
>
> Any arguments for and against the two options, here?
>
> BTW, I have updated the copyrights page:
>
>
> http://www.w3.org/community/webed/wiki/Web_Education_Community_Group:Copyrights
>
> Chris Mills
> Open standards evangelist and dev.opera.com editor, Opera Software
> Co-chair, web education community group, W3C
>
> * Try Opera: http://www.opera.com
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>
>
>