Licensing

[viluon]

How should different standards be licensed? In the 'real world', some might be proprietary. I suggest enforcing open source, submitters could however choose MIT or GPL. Worst case scenario should be (imo) that they are allowed to use CC BY ND or CC BY NC ND, but I am strongly against that to be honest.

[oeed]

I'm of the opinion that we should not force a license upon people, it should be up to them.

[lxndio]

Possibly the no license license?

[SquidDev]

I'd agree with @oeed on this one. Standards are about technologies/formats, rather than a way of developing things (though there are some standards on naming conventions and formatting).

[oeed]

I think we'll stick to not standardising licensing.

[viluon]

@oeed @SquidDev I wanted to prevent issues with copyright preventing the spread, use and (most importantly) future upgrades and fixes to proprietary standards.

[lyqyd]

How do other standards bodies (e.g., IETF) handle this issue? I'd suspect that copyright for the text of the standards themselves is held by the standards body, which then provides them under one consistent license. Code examples are another issue. I don't think a patchwork of licensing determined by the initial authors of various standards is a good idea, or even a practicable solution. I think this issue should be re-opened for further discussion.

[oeed]

@viluon Standardising a license isn't going to stop someone from placing copyright on their code; if they want to do it they're just going to do it. I guess we could recommend a license though.

@lyqyd I think we were mainly discussing licensing of code people write in their programs, but that is a good point. I'd say, regarding the license of the standards, the 'body' holds the copyright.

[viluon]

@oeed I wouldn't mind people to create proprietary utilities for dealing with the standards. I only want to ensure that something like RAR doesn't happen:

Creating RAR Files

RAR files can be created only with commercial software WinRAR, RAR, and other software that has written permission from Alexander Roshal or shares copyrighted code under license from Alexander Roshal. The software license agreements forbid reverse engineering. (...)

That is an example of great but dead technology. Great feature-wise, dead because of the way it is licensed. I wouldn't like to see any standards die.

[oeed]

Actually I misread what you said @viluon . I'd agree that all standards should be open source and should be publicly usable.

[viluon]

Agreed @oeed and @demhydraz, thanks! I therefore suggest using enforcing free culture CC licenses or other mainstream open source ones.

[oeed]

I'd vote GPL.

[oeed]

Actually good point @demhydraz, GFDL is the more appropriate one.

[viluon]

The thing is, @oeed, that MIT for example is more permissive. If people want to give their work away completely (such as publishing it into the public domain), let them do it. GFDL seems to be a very good idea @demhydraz

[SquidDev]

I'd vote for something that allows people do do whatever they want with the standard without worrying about licensing, as long as they don't claim credit for it themselves. I feel GPL is too restrictive, and GFDL has similar problems.

[viluon]

MIT FTW @SquidDev, but then again, that might be too free. I'd just really go with any open source license available.

[viluon]

I linked to it @demhydraz

[oeed]

This is the main benefit right here:

the original document or source code must be made available to the work's recipient

This means that people can build upon a standard within the terms of the license.

[viluon]

No, you linked to the wikipedia page.

which literally says

GNU Free Documentation License

@demhydraz

so GFDL everyone?

[viluon]

GFDL for the win!

[viluon]

This is the main benefit right here:

the original document or source code must be made available to the work's recipient

This means that people can build upon a standard within the terms of the license.

~ @oeed

[oeed]

@viluon please incorporate this in to the tutorial, I'll add a license page now.

[oeed]

The decision has been made, but the appropriate files need to be updated, hence why this has been reopened.

[viluon]

Hmm, we might also want to create a CONTRIBUTING.md file @oeed. I have a feeling that GitHub treats it in a special way, and attaches a reminder to review it before submitting an issue or a PR.

[viluon]

yep, I was right

[oeed]

Any update on adding this to CONTRIBUTING.md @viluon?

[viluon]

Added to the tutorial branch in https://github.com/oeed/CraftOS-Standards/commit/d4f82fbe21ea5fe687a7216e1e77b9f874bf5b60, sorry for the delay @oeed.

[oeed]

Thanks @viluon!