Relicense under CC BY - Githubissues

takenspc commented 8 years ago

I would like to propose relicensing Firefox Platform Status under CC BY or similar license.

According to https://platform-status.mozilla.org/, Firefox Platform Status is licensed under CC BY-SA.

However it can be said that this license limits potentials uses of Firefox Platform Status. Please let me explain.

One of the great features of Firefox Platform Status is showing other browsers' platform status. However, other browsers' platform status can not do that due to the license of Firefox Platform Status. Though I'm not sure whether or not they are planning.

Though I am not a lawyer, as my understanding:

A derivative work (e.g. Firefox Platform Status) of a CC BY licensed work (e.g. Chrome Platform Status) can be licensed under CC BY-SA.
A derivative work (e.g. Chrome Platform Status) of a CC BY-SA licensed work (e.g. Firefox Platform Status) can not be licensed under CC BY

The derivative work must be licensed under CC BY-SA

Similarly, if someone want to update other browsers' platform status based on Firefox Platform Status, he or she will face the license issue.

Thus I would like to propose that changing license of Firefox Platform Status to CC BY. Because,

A derivative work (e.g. Chrome Platform Status) of a CC BY licensed work (e.g. licensed Firefox Platform Status) can be licensed under CC BY

Note: I don't intend to change Mozilla.org Site Licensing Policies. The only thing I want to change is the license of Firefox Platform Status.

By the way, I am confusing the license of Firefox Platform Status because

package.json says MIT
LICENSE says Apache License 2.0
https://platform-status.mozilla.org/ says CC BY-SA

Is the Firefox Platform Status tri-licnsed?

marco-c commented 8 years ago

@gerv can you help here?

digitarald commented 8 years ago

@takenspc thank you for the deep dive into the world of licensing! We so far just picked Mozilla's defaults, so its good to spend some more time on double checking if we did the right thing.

package.json says MIT LICENSE says Apache License 2.0

Leftover from bootstrapping, we should fix this to the same. Other platform status pages seem to use Apache License 2.0 as well.

https://platform-status.mozilla.org/ says CC BY-SA

This says its for content, not code. For the re-licensing its not a clear cut as we only aggregate the status flags from the JSON and no text. But I am happy to use a license that's more widely used for similar data.

gerv commented 8 years ago

So there are two licenses here - one for the code and one for the content. For the code, the Mozilla license policy https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/license-policy/ says it should be either MPL 2 or Apache 2, at the choice of the authors. Given that LICENSE already says Apache 2.0, that would seem to make sense here.

For the content, the license is currently CC-BY-SA, which is a fairly standard Mozilla license for non-code things. The initial comment suggest that this is a problem, because (it says) other browsers' equivalent displays of platform status cannot import data from our system without making their own data available under the same license. Is that a fair summary of the issue?

Can someone provide a link to the equivalent websites for the other browsers and details of what licenses they use? If they are using open licenses already, but still can't import because they are using CC-BY and we are using SA, there might be some case for this. If they are using closed licenses, then it seems like there is no case for it whatsoever.

Gerv

marco-c commented 8 years ago

Can someone provide a link to the equivalent websites for the other browsers and details of what licenses they use?

Chrome Status (https://www.chromestatus.com/features), uses CC BY. WebKit Status (https://webkit.org/status/), the data is in the WebKit repository (https://svn.webkit.org/repository/webkit/trunk/Source/WebCore/ and https://svn.webkit.org/repository/webkit/trunk/Source/JavaScriptCore/). There are three LICENSE files in the first directory, zero in the second one, so I'm not sure what license applies here. Edge Status (https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/platform/status/), uses CC BY (https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/Status#using-status-data).

marco-c commented 8 years ago

For the content, the license is currently CC-BY-SA, which is a fairly standard Mozilla license for non-code things. The initial comment suggest that this is a problem, because (it says) other browsers' equivalent displays of platform status cannot import data from our system without making their own data available under the same license. Is that a fair summary of the issue?

I think so, @takenspc can confirm.

gerv commented 8 years ago

So then, I guess the question is whether we consider the fact that we can absorb their data but they can't absorb ours to be a competitive advantage for our site :-) Or whether we are happy to have all these sites become equivalent. Who is in charge of Firefox Platform Status?

digitarald commented 8 years ago

raising my ✋ . As I said before, use the same license helps converge and reduces any friction for data-reuse.

mozilla / platform-status

Relicense under CC BY #342