search

solid / solid-spec

Solid specification draft 0.7.0
Creative Commons Zero v1.0 Universal
1.13k stars 103 forks source link

Update LICENSE.md #213

Open Mitzi-Laszlo opened 4 years ago

Mitzi-Laszlo commented 4 years ago

In response to solid/process#103 and solid/process#155

jonassmedegaard commented 4 years ago

For the record, it is not (specific, explicit) Debian policy that drove me to kindly request that Kjetil declare his copyright statements differenty. What Debian policy explicitly dictates is that distributed projects must be "Free software" (with a definition of what that means - a definition which later was directly borrowed for the definition of "Open Source").

How to declare that a project is "Free software" has no simple rules, but my 20 years of experience sifting through what authors and copyright holders have scrippled draws patterns of common style in declaring it, and my conversations with lawyers and law enthusiasts have enlightened me why how that common style fit well with the purpose: To grant permissions - better known as licensing.

Please when you want to share works with the commons, do it explicitly and in the common style:

1) State the year the project a received substantive creative contribution, and the name and unique identifier of the copyright holder for that contribution. 2) State which license the copyright holder grants.

Makes sense to merge multiple copyright holder entries together, to form consecutive and/or non-consecutive ranges of years for same copyright holder.

If you try be creative with above, then you risk loosing out on some opportunities for reuse. Concretely, when you state copyright holder information not only for factual past contributions but also speculative "current" ones, you weaken the trust in those statements, making it harder to redistribute the work.

csarven commented 4 years ago

If I'm not mistaken, the MIT license is generally intended for Solid project's assets going forward. FWIW, solid/specification uses the MIT license. I'd suggest to stick to MIT for the case here as well.

IANAL: going from CC0 to MIT for this repo/spec/documentation is a minor change and as far as I understand, they're compatible. Perhaps the most important change here is the Copyright inclusion. Not sure about who is the (legal?) copyright holder.