RFC: Adopt CC-BY-SA-4.0 license here

[turnrye]

Summary

Adopt cc-by-sa-4.0 for this docs repo.

Motivation

This repository houses documentation and promotion materials about the OpenRTX project, and volunteers contribute their time to help build these things. OpenRTX is billed as "free" and "open", with the product source being licensed as GPL 3.0. This helps contributors understand that their contributions will be able to benefit the users of their system, and it provides legal protections for the product to ensure that uses of it are not exploited.

This repository does not have a license. This leaves doubt as to whether the docs are truly free and open as the project is described. Perhaps more significantly, not having a license on the webpage may lead to confusion for contributors as to how "free" and "open" are achieved. It may serve as a signal that the project is not valuing the volunteer's efforts. While all of these are arguably overreactions to reach, certainly there are some who will be left wondering "how open is open?"

Details

This repository should adopt the cc-by-sa-4.0 license. This license is well established, appearing across 20,800 repositories on github. It is also generally aligned with the goals of OpenRTX as being free and open, but not disallow derivative commercial work in case these docs make sense to be referenced in other material should a commercial OpenRTX implementation.

"Share alike" may not be quite as clear as needed. I imagine the use case of sharing materials from this site (such as in user manuals or references in videos, blog articles, or magazine articles), which I understand does not mandate a "share alike" scenario. "Share alike" applies to derivative works, such as if there were a fork of OpenRTX that also forked the documentation and make their own changes. So I assert that "share alike" is a good addition for us to adopt here. For a detailed analysis on how sharealike aligns with the existing code license, review this analysis.

Implementing this RFC would mean:

• adding a LICENSE.md file to the repository that contains
• adding a statement in the footer of the generated page stating:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Drawbacks

• CC is irrevocable, so if we want to "change" license in the future, the best that we can do is actually multi-license. There is no undoing this change.
• CC is irrevocable, so if there are misalignments with our goals or unforeseen consequences, these will not be able to be addressed.

Alternatives

There is also the GNU Free Documentation License, but this license is not as popular at this point. My impression as a non-lawyer is that it is a bit less proven.

Open Questions

• Can we apply a license to the project? Legally, who is the owner that needs to agree with this?
• Are there any restrictions or limitations that we need to note, such as carving out portions of this project that are not owned by OpenRTX authors or licensed in the same way?

Call to action

As this repo does not have a formal RFC process, I suggest that at a minimum the identified legal owner sign off on this change plus a reasonable number of core maintainers of the project (to be decided by the maintainers).