License for gwt-site content

[Colin Alworth]

See the question raised at https://github.com/gwtproject/gwt-site/issues/328.

While gwtproject explicitly licenses all "software and sample code" as under the Apache License 2.0, it appears that we don't have a license specified for the contents of the gwtproject website (https://gwtproject.org, https://github.com/gwtproject/gwt-site/). A case could be made that the content is already licensed as under the same license. It was my understanding that this is discouraged (though at the moment I'm having a hard time seeing why that would be). I can find concrete examples of the Apache Foundation licensing their documentation under the Apache License
 * https://github.com/apache/couchdb-documentation
 * https://github.com/apache/cordova-docs

On the other hand, if the Apache license that applies to all code and samples does not apply to the contents, then each author owns their own content directly.

I am not a lawyer, but my understanding is that (at least in the country in which I reside) content is copyrighted by default, and the author owns that copyright. Additional rights must be granted by the author. If we want to change the license, we need the approval of the authors so far - https://github.com/gwtproject/gwt-site/graphs/contributors. Anyone who doesn't approve would need to have their content removed, if we decide to change.

Are we sufficiently clear that all content is Apache licensed, including the website documentation? Is there a good reason to consider a different license instead? Should we seek confirmation from any authors of substantial amounts of content that their content falls under the license we choose?

My suggestion is to clarify that all content is under the Apache License, and see a confirmation from any author who wrote more than ~5 lines of content. If we think we are already clear that all content is under that license, then we should state that in an up front way, such as setting the "license" metadata of the gwt-site repo, and adding a LICENSE file.

Thoughts, suggestions, pointers to how other projects have handled this?

[Jens]

Haven't all changes been made through gerrit and did require a CLA? 

--J.

[Colin Alworth]

Ah thank you, I'm very happy to be wrong. I checked a several commits but didn't think to look at PRs.

Changes made to gwt-site do not go through gerrit, but through github since late 2014, though the CLA bot does still track it.

I had already gone through the list of committers who made changes to markdown that were more than 5 lines in total and narrowed that list to only ones who didn't have a CLA on gwt-review.googlesource.com, but it turns out that list of ~38 people must have signed the CLA in some other way. I'll recheck the PRs those committers were involved in to confirm, but it sounds like we just need to clarify the license directly, since the CLA gives us (well, Google technically) the right to do that.

As Google is winding down their direct involvement in the project, the CLA bot will be turned off soon, and we'll want to be sure we have an explicitly license in all projects that covers contributions, but so far this was the only project deficient in this way - and the only project not covered by gerrit.

Thanks again for finding my mistake.

[Jens]

As Google is winding down their direct involvement in the project, the CLA bot will be turned off soon, and we'll want to be sure we have an explicitly license in all projects that covers contributions, but so far this was the only project deficient in this way - and the only project not covered by gerrit.

I am wondering if Google should also hand over CLAs to someone else, given that they need to be accessible for non-Googlers somehow if Google is winding down their involvement further. Ideally some CLA Github bot should be fed with them (and any future CLAs of future contributors).

-- J.