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ethereum / devp2p

Ethereum peer-to-peer networking specifications
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licensing and other legal concerns #76

Open bmann opened 5 years ago

bmann commented 5 years ago

This repo should have a clear license and clear message to contributors under what license they are contributing works.

For specifications, CC-0 is one option.

However, patent coverage is something else that needs to be considered. I have brought the patent issue up for EIPs as well, so consider this issue just to be licensing for now.

fjl commented 5 years ago

I'm not sure how to proceed here.

bmann commented 5 years ago

@fjl for starters, follow the EIP repo in applying CC0 to the spec.

fjl commented 5 years ago

The part I don't understand is: why does a having a license matter for this project? There is nothing to protect here. We want people to implement the specs in software, and it's fine if anybody copies the specs and turns them into something else.

bmann commented 5 years ago

Any of your contributors can assert copyright if they don’t explicitly give it away. You’re protecting the open-ness. Without a license, all contributions are either owned by the individuals or by their employers (based on their employment). Why? Because we have messed up copyright laws.

rlegene commented 4 years ago

Have a look at https://choosealicense.com/ and specifically https://choosealicense.com/no-permission/ which is also available from the front page of that site.