egpbos
commented
2 years ago It would be nice to have this discussion at the cookiecutter level as well. Seems like a good default to me.
Open LourensVeen opened 3 years ago
egpbos
commented
2 years ago It would be nice to have this discussion at the cookiecutter level as well. Seems like a good default to me.
The template lets you select a license that you want to license your package under, and puts that into the generated package. But the generated package itself contains a lot of text that's copied straight from the template, which is licensed under the Apache License 2.0. So arguably, any package created from this template should carry two licenses, an Apache 2.0 license licensing the eScience Center-owned part of the copyright, and a license statement describing that the user's part of the copyright is licensed under whichever license they chose.
That's possible, as all the licenses on offer here are compatible with the Apache 2.0 license. But it also feels a bit weird. Should the eScience Center really become part-owner of the copyrights of all packages initialised using our template? Are we going to sue anyone who (accidentally or intentionally) removes our copyright from their package?
I propose that we add a statement that makes it clear that while the template is licensed under the Apache License 2.0, we consider the generated code to be CC0. That means you can just use it and license the generated code and your additions in any way you want, without having to drag along an extra license. Basically, what everyone does, and what the template itself does, but making it official.
GCC does the same thing with its headers, those will end up in your binary when you compile your code, but it has a statement that says that the GPL does not extend to those headers and that you can license your binary in any way you want.