Our licenses have drifted from "pure" BSD, we should fix that...

[Fernando Perez]

Hi all,

I recently noticed that there's something funny about the way our license is worded compared to the BSD template... 

Our licenses say

"Neither the name of JupyterLab...", "... name of Jupyter...", etc...

But the original BSD template reads (https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause)

"Neither the name of the copyright holder..."

and the term "copyright holder" isn't a variable to template over, just the words "copyright holder".  In our case, that is "Project Jupyter" in some licenses, and I'd argue it should read "Project Jupyter Team" to indicate that it's the *people*, not the abstract/legal project entity...

I didn't realize that our licenses had changed in this way, but in a sense we are NOT using BSD!  We've made a subtle but important change, as we've basically added a trademark barrier in the third clause (hence this question the person is asking), whereas the original third clause is about *endorsement of promotion*.

I had never noticed this, but I would argue that our licenses should:

1. All read:

Copyright... The Project Jupyter Development Team.

This would convey the fact that we're talking about the people who wrote the code.  It's our shorthand for the union of all `git shortlog -sne`...

2. Actually use the real BSD license text, not some subtly modified version.  That means that other than filling in the placeholders, we leave the body of text unmodified.

What do people think?

Cheers,

ps - sorry that I'm sending this and going offline, the discussion started on the council list and Jason correctly pointed out that this is really an open topic... Reposting here for reference, hopefully others can provide feedback in my absence.

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Fernando Perez (@fperez_org; http://fperez.org)
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[Chris Colbert]

I've actually talked to some people knowledgeable in this area, who adamantly claim that "The <Foo> Team" is not a legal entity, and therefore cannot hold copyright. Assuming that's true, it makes "Project Jupyter Team" a meaningless statement wrt copyright.

FWIW (and IANAL) - I use "PhosphorJS Contributors" in my license header, and "copyright holder" in the body text.

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[Brian Granger]

We sort of knew that the "Jupyter Team" was not a legal entity when we
added it, but didn't have a better language at the time. I think that
"Jupyter Contributors" is probably a slightly better way of wording
this from a legal perspective, because each Jupyter Contributor exists
from a legal perspective and is in fact a copyright holder. Even
though, informally all of us equate Team == Contributors.

+1 to this change.

Cheers,

Brian

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Brian E. Granger
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[MinRK]

+1 to the change. Not quite sure how we drifted there, but it may well have been my doing during the split. We have defined in our IPython license file "The IPython Development Team is the set of all contributors to the IPython project," so it is already synonymous with Contributors, and has never been an entity. But if using the plural "Contributors" text is clearer than the collective "Team", that's fine, too, and changes no meaning.

-MinRK

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[Damián Avila]

+1 to use the real BSD.

>But if using the plural "Contributors" text is clearer than the collective "Team", that's fine, too, and changes no meaning.

+1 too.

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Damián

[Jason Grout]

For a specific project, say JupyterLab, should we "JupyterLab contributors", to indicate that those individuals who contributed to that specific project are the ones that hold copyright? Or should we give the generic "Project Jupyter Contributors"

Also, FYI, the Wikipedia text has the place for 'copyright holders' as a templated term, perhaps that's where we got the other text: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses#3-clause_license_.28.22Revised_BSD_License.22.2C_.22New_BSD_License.22.2C_or_.22Modified_BSD_License.22.29

Thanks,

Jason

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[Brian Granger]

On Mon, Jul 25, 2016 at 7:58 PM, Jason Grout <ja...@jasongrout.org> wrote:
> For a specific project, say JupyterLab, should we "JupyterLab contributors",
> to indicate that those individuals who contributed to that specific project
> are the ones that hold copyright? Or should we give the generic "Project
> Jupyter Contributors"

Because people tend to move fluidly between different
repos/subprojects, I would prefer the generic "Project Jupyter
Contributors". Also this more easily covers situations where we
re-organize code between repos/subprojects, as tends to happen
sometimes...

Cheers,

Brian

> https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/jupyter/CAPDWZHwtPrzZwT6%3D11rZxoMr2RbOx%2BOiJXojd%2BXHB90draDNNg%40mail.gmail.com.

>
> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.



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[Jason Grout]

Makes sense. I've put in a PR to JupyterLab with this change so we can see what it looks like: https://github.com/jupyter/jupyterlab/pull/543/files

I also switched the clauses to use numbering, like on the opensource.org website template.

Jason

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[Brian Granger]

Thanks!

> https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/jupyter/CAPDWZHxL6C2_iHp%3DHLp9fY%2BvPktXdWoZBPsAvjX4y5oxHrnc%3Dg%40mail.gmail.com.

[Evan Bolyen]

GitHub actually uses the Wikipedia-style template, so whenever you set an automatic LICENSE it uses that (see here). The page Fernando linked also states that the 3rd clause was changed, my interpretation being that the "original" BSD-Modified/3-Clause was just the omission of the 4th clause which made it incompatible with GPL. It does look like the 3rd clause has since been revised, but I have no idea what the legal implications are.

-Evan

[ellisonbg]

Fernando,

I think we should move forward with a decision on this issue. Some things under consideration:

* Replace "Project Jupyter Team" by "Jupyter Contributors" in our copyright notice in files.

* Move to an exact copy of the BSD license rather than one with subtle changes.

Jason has proposed using the version of the BSD license from the OSI:

https://opensource.org/

I think you should make the call so we can move forward with things (or not).

If folks have concerns they have not voiced, please do so now :) 

Cheers,

Brian

[Fernando Perez]

On Thu, Aug 18, 2016 at 11:43 AM, ellisonbg <elli...@gmail.com> wrote:

Fernando,

I think we should move forward with a decision on this issue. Some things under consideration:

* Replace "Project Jupyter Team" by "Jupyter Contributors" in our copyright notice in files.

* Move to an exact copy of the BSD license rather than one with subtle changes.

Jason has proposed using the version of the BSD license from the OSI:

https://opensource.org/

I think you should make the call so we can move forward with things (or not).

If folks have concerns they have not voiced, please do so now :) 

Correct, this is what I said in Jason's open PR (https://github.com/jupyter/jupyterlab/pull/543):

"""

I'm happy to merge it, and I'm +1 on the changes. Even accepting a certain amount of legal ambiguity around the notion of "contributors" as a copyright holder, I think right now it's the best we have to communicate the more complex and nuanced mouthful of "everyone in the repo holds individual copyrights to their changes, and therefore the copyright of the whole repo is the sum total of those contributions, all of which are jointly licensed under the BSD terms..."

It's also somewhat accepted community-wide, so I think it's the best we're going to get for now. We can't paralyze every step of our process until the Supreme Court gives us an opinion :)

"""

For reference, that PR already makes the changes listed by Brian above, which I think make sense (thanks Jason!).  Even if a lot of the open source community --us included-- is using this notion of "collective copyright" that will not satisfy a legal scholar, I also don't think it's a completely unreasonable stance to take.

For the sake of community input, I'll leave it open now and will merge tomorrow Friday if there's no *new* concerns raised. If so, please put them up on the PR itself.

Cheers,

f

[Brian Granger]

Great, thanks!