Licensing issues

[nickstenning]

I recently had cause to look into the licensing of code submitted to the cookbook, and have encountered a few issues which it would be good to address. In order of least to most (potentially) contentious:

1. It's not easy to find the license. The rendered documentation doesn't appear to include information on licensing, and there's no LICENSE file in the repository.

2. What information there is on licensing isn't consistent. setup.py says license="BSD-derived (http://www.repoze.org/LICENSE.txt)" but CONTRIBUTORS.txt has this paragraph:

   Code committed to the Pyramid Cookbook source repository (Committed Code)
   must be governed by the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share
   Alike 3.0 United States License
   (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/). Until Agendaless
   Consulting declares in writing an acceptable license other than the by-nc-sa
   3.0 license, only it shall be used. A list of exceptions is detailed within
   the "Licensing Exceptions" section of this document, if one exists.

3. The license that I would have to assume from the above (CC BY-NC-SA) seems to me inappropriate for a "cookbook" -- namely, a reference from which people might well expect they can copy code or code patterns.

   In particular, the "NC" clause is highly problematic, not least due to varied interpretations of what constitutes "commercial" activity in different jurisdictions around the world. It is my understanding, for example, that in Germany teaching in schools and universities would be considered a commercial activity. Perhaps it is your intention to limit the use of code examples from the cookbook in such contexts, but I would guess not! You can find all kinds of articles detailing real and potential problems with "NC" clauses around the web, but here's one good summary article.

   The "SA" clause is also problematic. My reading of the "SA" clauses would imply that if I used code from the cookbook and modified it, I would be unable to release that code as part of an MIT/BSD licensed project, and I might be unable to release that code as part of any project that wasn't CC-SA licensed (although I'm not sure about this... perhaps a copyleft license would fulfil the requirement). Somewhat bizarrely, this would seem to imply that code from the cookbook couldn't be released as part of Pyramid itself, which is released under a BSD-like license.

It would be good to get some of this cleared up. If we need to hail someone who understands CC licenses (which is not something I can reasonably claim) to this issue I'd be happy to do so.

Given the references to Agendaless in CONTRIBUTORS.txt I'm going to tag @mcdonc and @tseaver here.

[tseaver]

@nickstenning I think you've raised a valid concern. I'm not sure what @mcdonc intended in selecting CC BY-NC-SA, but seem to recall it was intended as a defense against someone ripping off the docs as a book and selling them.

I think a "License Exceptions" section in CONTRIBUTORS.txt stating that code examples were under the stock, BSD-like license (as in the first section of Pyramid's LICENSE.txt would be appropriate. We should also copy in the appropriate license texts to a new LICENSE.txt file.

[mikeorr]

Do we really object to somebody selling the Cookbook as a book? My main
concern is not that somebody might make money off it, but that it's not
high enough quality to be worth charging more than a printing fee. Unless
it's just bundled as an extra with the manual. Perhaps the manual's license
was simply propagated without thinking enough. I'd say the nature of a
user-writen (wiki-like) cookbook is such that it should have whatever the
literary equivalent of a BSD license is, and that's what the contributors
expected.

On Mon, Dec 7, 2015 at 7:26 AM, Tres Seaver notifications@github.com
wrote:

@nickstenning https://github.com/nickstenning I think you've raised a
valid concern. I'm not sure what @mcdonc https://github.com/mcdonc
intended in selecting CC BY-NC-SA, but seem to recall it was intended as
a defense against someone ripping off the docs as a book and selling them.

I think a "License Exceptions" section in CONTRIBUTORS.txt stating that
code examples were under the stock, BSD-like license (as in the first
section of Pyramid's LICENSE.txt
https://github.com/Pylons/pyramid/blob/master/LICENSE.txt would be
appropriate. We should also copy in the appropriate license texts to a new
LICENSE.txt file.

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#153 (comment)
.

Mike Orr sluggoster@gmail.com

[mcdonc]

The intent for all the docs was to rerelease them under the same license as the code, fwiw

[stevepiercy]

@mcdonc @tseaver Is there any action needed on this issue? If so, I'll do whatever work is necessary to make it so, whatever that is. Otherwise, I'm inclined to close this issue as a non-issue.

[tseaver]

@stevepiercy I believe the work to be done is to remove any bits which mention CC-BY-NC-SA.

[stevepiercy]

WIP: #215

@tseaver deletion of the bits leaves it grammatically awkward and potentially legally void. I'm not sure what to do instead. At least we have something to revise and discuss further.