Define a policy for licensing repos

[Mr0grog]

Over at ipfs/docs, I’ve created a PR to add a license. It’s just MIT to keep it simple, but we have a variety of different licensing schemes across repos (taken from this survey of repos):

• MIT for most repositories
• CC-BY-SA (Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported)
  • ipfs/logo
  • ipfs/pm
• CC-BY-SA (Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International)
  • ipfs/artwork
• CC-BY 3.0 US (Attribution 3.0 United States)
  • ipfs/apps
• CC0 (CC0 1.0 Universal, i.e. Public Domain)
  • ipfs/awesome-ipfs
  • ipfs/reading-list
• Combo: CC-BY-SA (Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported) for docs and MIT for code
  • ipfs/community
• Combo: CC-BY (Attribution only, no Share-Alike Clause) for output, MIT for source
  • ipfs/website

(Side note: a bunch of these use CC 3.0 licenses. CC has since released a 4.0 round of licenses, so we may want to update those. I’m not sure what the changes were, though.)

Is there a more cohesive and coherent policy we can make around licensing?

[Mr0grog]

Alright, @victorbjelkholm alerted me to #139, which covers a similar topic area. Should I close this in favor of that, or keep it open because this is a little more narrow and actionable?

[Kubuxu]

@Mr0grog we are using CC for licensing assets as MIT is not a good license for that.
In short MIT for code and IMO CC-BY-SA for assets.

[Mr0grog]

That seems reasonable. What about the way ipfs/website handles it? (All source is MIT, all output, not assets/text/docs, is CC. That was a surprising one to see!)

[Mr0grog]

Is the right place to document this as a PR in ipfs/community?

[Kubuxu]

I think yes.

[vmx]

The repos I work on are using CC-BY and not CC-BY-SA. I actually had a discussion about it (sorry I can't find it anymore) which even lea to changing things from CC-BY-SA: ipld/ipld#27 I'm strongly in favour of using CC-BY as it matches MIT well, it's without the copyleft part.

[daviddias]

Tagging @ianjdarrow to this one

[Mr0grog]

I think this was resolved in #298. Are you revisiting it, or did I just fail to close this when we added the doc?

[daviddias]

@Mr0grog, @ianjdarrow will be posting an update to the Licensing Policy soon that will simplify it dramatically for maintainers and contributors. tl;dr; it will be a double license of Apache 2 + MIT, but I defer the explanation to @ianjdarrow.

[daviddias]

The update is here -> ipfs/team-mgmt#849

Closing this issue, let's continue in ipfs/team-mgmt#849