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typst-community / typst-package-template

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What license to use #5

Open SillyFreak opened 5 months ago

SillyFreak commented 5 months ago

Disclaimer: I look up licensing when I have to, but have no legal training in this or any other area.

The template is currently using the Unlicense, after previously being under the GPL. I have read (1, which references 2) that Unlicense is too "naive" to really work. There is also the CC0 which seems to have some high-profile adopters, so it might be a good replacement that get to the same goal, but with better chance of success.

I see the goal of this repository's license to be that any package can use it as the template, regardless of what license that package ends up using. It's thus not desirable to have a license that requires attribution. From what I can easily tell, that means that permissive licenses are not a good fit; the CC license chooser goes straight to CC0 when you select that attribution should not be necessary.

jamesrswift commented 5 months ago

I'm not fussed about the license at all. As this really is a template, its only included to indicate to the package author that they will want to include their own license. I'd think of it more as a placeholder. Perhaps we remove the license altogether and replace it with text that the author should replace with the appropriate license?

SillyFreak commented 5 months ago

So I did a bit more reading and i think the only files that we theoretically even need to worry about are Justfile and .github/workflows/tests.yml - everything else should be minor enough to not be copyrightable anyway.

For those files, removing the license altogether would imo not be good: no license means no permission to use these files. For users that care, this would be a problem. One option is also to add a license directly to those files (then MIT would be appropriate, I think), and then have an empty LICENSE file as a placeholder.

In practice, it will probably not matter much what we do/if we change anything... It's just easier to change license things as long as the number of contributors is low.