Added DCO

[nebrius]

Required for all CONTRIBUTING.md files

[scottgonzalez]

There's currently no license associated with this project, so I'm not sure how a DCO would apply.

[jasnell]

All projects under the Foundation automatically inherit an MIT license unless the WG specifically chooses a different one.

[mikeal]

The DCO specifically mentions "the license in the file" so we'll want a SPDX references to the license of each file. Something like this http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6867

[nebrius]

Can you expand on how we would use SPDX references? I haven't used them before, and from my brief reading it looks like a file format, right?

[nebrius]

Alternatively, would it be sufficient to do something like this?

## License

This repository is governed by the [Node.js project-wide license](https://github.com/nodejs/node/blob/master/LICENSE).

[ashleygwilliams]

SPDX is what npm uses for licenses. it's just one of these: http://spdx.org/licenses/. we can just mention that we inherit MIT from the node repo. MIT being a valid SPDX that we can easily copy and paste into a LICENSE file. then we simply add a header like this:

// Copyright 2016 by the Node.JS Inclusivity WG
// SPDX-License-Identifier: CC-BY-4.0

We should probably pick a version of Creative Commons as this is not code and MIT doesn't really make sense.

[nebrius]

Oh yeah, I like the Creative Commons idea. Are there any concerns or roadblocks from the TSC or foundation with using CC?

[mikeal]

This repository is governed by the Node.js project-wide license

This isn't gonna work. The DCO makes specific mention of "the license in the file" which means that we need a license reference in every file :(

[mikeal]

Would change:

// Copyright 2016 by the Node.JS Inclusivity WG

To

// Copyright 2016 by the Node.js Inclusivity Contributors

We aren't doing a copyright re-assignment so the contributions are owned by the people who contribute them.

[ashleygwilliams]

good call @mikeal i was being sloppy ;)

[mikeal]

This is just me saying my own opinion, but I haven't seen a very compelling argument for using CC licenses in non-code work that is part of a technology project. If anything it creates a possible issue, or at least strange concerns, around distributing the work with the project. I think for artistic works it makes a huge amount of sense but I don't know what the argument is for it over the project license for docs and non-code materials distributed with the project.

[mikeal]

SPDX

This is an effort, sponsored by the Linux Foundation, to normalize the identifiers for public licenses so that they might be more easily audit-able.

[nebrius]

Let me know if this matches the SPDX license format for MIT properly! I added it to README and CONTRIBUTING.

I left it out of the meeting notes files, should I add the license there too?

[mikeal]

yup https://spdx.org/licenses/MIT.html

[ashleygwilliams]

can you squash the license additions into a single commit? after that i'll happily merge

[ashleygwilliams]

heh, i just meant the last two, but this is fine. merging.

[nebrius]

lol, that's what I get for rebasing before my morning tea

[scottgonzalez]

Copyright years are an interesting thing, but I think you want 2015 in the old meeting notes.

[nebrius]

Copyright years are an interesting thing, but I think you want 2015 in the old meeting notes.

Good call. Off the top of your head, do you know if Node typically does Copyright <start year> to <present year> for files that are worked on over multiple years, or do we typically just list the start year?

[scottgonzalez]

I'm not sure what the lawyers prefer, but the main license for node does the saner thing and just omits the year: https://github.com/nodejs/node/blob/53cc9785abcdd23aa578495ee6b97c3a0a83414c/LICENSE#L4

[nebrius]

I created a new PR that removes years to match the main repo: https://github.com/nodejs/inclusivity/pull/75. Thanks again @scottgonzalez!