licenses

[aram harrow]

Dear sciraters,
We need to make two decisions.

1. The code should be under some kind of license.
Ben Toner favors the MIT license, which pretty much lets anyone do
anything they want with the code, including something commercial.

Here is a version from wikipedia.
---
Copyright (C) <year> <copyright holders>

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining
a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the
"Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including
without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish,
distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to
permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to
the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.
IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY
CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT,
TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE
SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
-----


2. The comments and other user-generated data should be under some
sort of license.
Ben points out that stackexchange uses "CC by-sa 3.0"
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
which seems pretty harmless.

----------
You are free:

to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work
to Remix — to adapt the work
to make commercial use of the work
Under the following conditions:

Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by
the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they
endorse you or your use of the work).
Share Alike — If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you
may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar
license to this one.
With the understanding that:

Waiver — Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get
permission from the copyright holder.
Public Domain — Where the work or any of its elements is in the public
domain under applicable law, that status is in no way affected by the
license.
Other Rights — In no way are any of the following rights affected by
the license:
Your fair dealing or fair use rights, or other applicable copyright
exceptions and limitations;
The author's moral rights;
Rights other persons may have either in the work itself or in how the
work is used, such as publicity or privacy rights.
Notice — For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others
the license terms of this work. The best way to do this is with a link
to this web page.
-------------


Does anyone have any opinions on this?

-aram

[Jim Harrington]

Both of Ben's suggestions seem reasonable to me.

--Jim

-aram

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[Bill Rosgen]

On 2013-03-21, at 6:16 , aram harrow <har...@gmail.com> wrote:

> 1. The code should be under some kind of license.
> Ben Toner favors the MIT license, which pretty much lets anyone do
> anything they want with the code, including something commercial.

I am fine with the MIT license. (I am also fine with either public domain or some flavour of GPL too, if anyone has a preference). We might also want to try to get a response out of Dave, as he's the other party with code in the repository.

> 2. The comments and other user-generated data should be under some
> sort of license.
> Ben points out that stackexchange uses "CC by-sa 3.0"
> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
> which seems pretty harmless.

This is true: if we aren't claiming to own user-generated data (and we shouldn't), then there should be some kind of license here too that allows us to display said content. The people behind stackexchange probably know more about this than I do, so it seems a good idea to use the same terms.

Bill

[Dave Bacon]

I'm always a fan of the MIT license, even if it is named after a
second rate technical school :)

For the comments and user generated data, CC by sa 3.0 looks good.
Probably also there is room here to think about policies regarding
data liberation (can users download their data?) and also what ever
happens if there is a take down request.

Ah the joys of the modern computer legalese.

Dave

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--
Dave Bacon
Theoretical Ski Bum

[aram harrow]

Ok, sounds like we have consensus on the MIT license + CC%#$&%$ license.

Dave, those are good features to add. Currently on the list is a
"export the entire DB" feature to guard against stuff being lost if
the host goes down. But I think a priority-5 or 6 feature (i.e. lower
priority than the other near-term goals we set) would be for users to
be able to download a record of all of the data they have submitted to
the site. This is potentially more annoying because it should require
a higher level of authentication, probably for now meaning at least
clicking on a confirmation email.
Letting users delete their comments is already on the list. I'm not
sure if we want users to be able to easily delete their entire list of
interactions with the site, although of course someone could always do
this using a script.


aram