License policy

[github-learning-lab[bot]]

Step 8: Add information about your organization's license recommendations

Licensing can be one of the most challenging aspects of open source for enterprises. Successful open source organizations have policies that clarify their position on licenses for projects they are consuming, contributing to, and maintaining.

Partners in this process

You will want to @ mention your legal team here as your partners in this step.

Why are licenses important?

The opensource.guide article on The Legal Side of Open Source is an excellent resource to share on why licensing is important.

In short, if a project does not have a license, it is considered copyrighted work and cannot truly be open source. Investing some time in the early stages of your program to identify the licenses you will use or accept will pay off down the line.

Your license policy

Your license policy will consist of three distinct groups of licenses:

• Consuming: These are the licenses on the open source projects you consume internally.
• Contributing: These are the licenses you are willing to accept on projects your employees may contribute to as part of their work. This is likely to be a subset of those in the consuming category.
• Releasing: These are the license types approved for use on projects owned by your organization. There are typically different licenses for different types of content. For example, written documentation may use different licenses than software.

:keyboard: Activity: Add a license

We have created a template license policy for you in this pull request. Work with your legal team to complete the following steps:

1. Identify your organization's preferred open source license for projects it is releasing and add these to the license-policy.md document in this pull request.
2. Evaluate common open source licenses and decide which you are willing to accept for projects consumed and contributed to. Add these to the license-policy.md.
3. Define and document the process you will use to enforce your license policy.
4. When you're ready to move on, merge this pull request.

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I'll respond when you merge this pull request.

[github-learning-lab[bot]]

Great! Let's go to the next pull request.