[Harmony-Drafting] Licensing for website content and agreements

Allison Randal allison at lohutok.net
Mon Jun 6 18:47:03 UTC 2011


I'll update the website when I have a sense that any concerns by members
of the drafting group have been discussed and resolved (to the extent
possible).

CC0 was discussed for the agreements (not for the website content), but
raised concerns:

- partly because it wasn't entirely clear that CC0 is valid across a
large number of jurisdictions

- partly because most other FLOSS licenses/CAs are satisfied with a bare
copyright statement or a simple statement that verbatim copies are
allowed, and don't need a "license for the license"

- partly because we don't want to disclaim all rights in the agreements,
because we want people to change the name if they modify it in
non-standard ways, so we don't end up with a thousand variations of
"Harmony contributor agreements" floating around (part of the goal of
Harmony is to make it easy for developers and lawyers to review the
agreements, so keeping it to a few well-known variations is desirable)

So, drafting our own short terms seemed the best fit for the agreements.


I'm not as concerned about the license for the website content, because
it's mostly just FAQs, and seems highly unlikely that it will be
reusable in any meaningful way. I'm comfortable with the longer version
of the name ("Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License."),
since that's what Creative Commons gives as the output from their
license picker. (I think "Unported" sounds vaguely illegal, and they
would have been better off calling it "International" like they do in
the selector form, but editing CC's work is definitely out of scope for
Harmony. :)

Allison

On 05/30/2011 12:00 PM, consiliens wrote:
> When will the website and agreements be updated to reflect the chosen
> license?
> 
> Is there a reason why CC BY won out over CC0?  I think either is fine,
> however I know some have raised concerns about CC BY on the old list and
> on identi.ca.
> 
> If CC BY is selected, the footer should contain the full name of the
> license including jurisdiction.
> 
> "under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License"
> 
> On 05/18/2011 03:19 PM, Allison Randal wrote:
>> In the call we discussed the need to make a difference between general
>> modifications and expected variations (picking options and substituting
>> the variables for project name, submission instructions, and
>> instructions for what to do when you aren't the copyright owner). Here's
>> a suggested revision:
>>
>> On 05/17/2011 12:06 PM, Allison Randal wrote:
>>> Website footer:
>>>
>>> Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under a
>>> Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.
>>>
>>> Policy page:
>>>
>>> Except where otherwise noted, all content on this site is licensed under
>>> a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. Everyone is permitted to
>>> copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Harmony contributor
>>> agreements. Modified versions of the agreements, however, should not be
>>> called "Harmony" agreements.
>>
>> Except where otherwise noted, all content on this site is licensed under
>> a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. Everyone is permitted to
>> copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Harmony contributor
>> agreements, including the standard option selections and requested
>> information about the project. Versions of the agreements that have been
>> modified in any other way, however, should not be called "Harmony"
>> agreements.
>>
>> Allison
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>> Harmony-Drafting mailing list
>> Harmony-Drafting at lists.harmonyagreements.org
>> http://lists.harmonyagreements.org/mailman/listinfo/harmony-drafting
>>
> 
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