Re: Licensing: feedback wanted

On 30 Nov 2011, at 13:35, Richard D. Worth wrote:

> 
> On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 8:18 AM, Karl Dubost <karld@opera.com> wrote:
> 
> Le 30 nov. 2011 à 07:36, Chris Mills a écrit :
> > 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?
> 
> 
> We have a very similar case here. We want the content to be widespread by people and reused be it in a commercial context and/or an open context. As long as the source stays open, people have always the possibility to use it. It's why I'm in favor of CC-BY
> 
> If we were authoring all the content ourselves, I think I could be in complete agreement, as CC-BY is most analogous to a permissive code license, such as MIT or BSD, which have shown to permit sufficient adoption and use (surely due in large part to their simplicity) amongst all the most popular JavaScript libraries for example (the software I'm most familiar with writing and licensing).
> 
> However, deciding to license our content CC-BY would preclude us from using any content from MDN, as just one example. Is that worth it? I'm not sure it is.

This is not necessarily the case - a licensor can waive certain license conditions if they see fit. And we are intending to talk to the different content holders about using their content on the site, rather than just using it and not telling them. This needed for etiquette and goodwill to be maintained.

Of course, we could perhaps go with CC-BY-SA but then state clearly in the license material that if you want to use our material in a commercial project of some kind but don't want to put it under the same license, then contact us and we will review your particular case - if we approve then we will waive the -SA- condition?

Yes, I agree that source code should be public domain, for reasons Richard outlined.

And yes, the MDN license page is really good.