[Harmony-Drafting] Licensing for website content and agreements

Dennis E. Hamilton dennis.hamilton at acm.org
Wed Jun 8 13:40:28 UTC 2011


Regarding (with the numbering corresponding to markers in-line):

">The Project 
> Harmony contribution agreements may be modified, but modified versions 
> may not distributed under the Harmony brand; provided that such 
> modified versions may include the following notice: "This Contribution 
> Agreement is a modified version of contribution agreements developed 
> by Project Harmony."
"I think a simple licence along the lines of Allison's statement is fine, then we can add an attribution statement if this is the general consensus.

1.  It appears to me that by changing "may" to "shall"/"must"  is close to a required attribution statement for derivatives.   At most one might require reference to the Harmony document from which derivation has occurred.  Having this  also means that folks don't have to hunt someone down to find out what an acceptable attribution is, a common omission in most CC-by declarations that I run across.

2. I don't think GPL and CC-by are in any way equivalent.  GPL is more like CC-share-alike without attribution (and without any confusion/presumed-endorsement prohibition too).  Also, GPL has provisions  that are not very meaningful for documents and specifications, including template agreement documents.   I find it odd that the CC-by is considered to have more terms than the GPL.  Which GPL license is that?  I think it is wise to start from the position that there is no thing as "just another open source license."  

 - Dennis

MORE THOUGHTS

3. I favor the CC-by arrangement (but none of the share-alike and non-commercial variations).  The nice part about it is that there is no need to copy the CC-by license itself or even the CC-by deed (a very public-spirited achievement, by the way).  It is also permissive in the way you appear to desire.  There does need to be a statement on the limitation with regard to confusion with any Harmony contribution-agreement templates (just as there is no thing as just another "contribution agreement"), but simple plain language should suffice.  For web pages, there are established practices for embedding links, using the CC-by logotype, and also embedding "semantic" information that does not intrude on the human-readable presentation.  This also works in electronic documents as well as web pages, depending on the digital format of the document.

I assume that the Apache Contributor License Agreement forms (one of which I have just executed) are not themselves explicitly licensed (so are simply all-rights-reserved from birth) because they are specific to contributions to the Apache Software Foundation and are not offered as templates.

-----Original Message-----
From: harmony-drafting-bounces at lists.harmonyagreements.org [mailto:harmony-drafting-bounces at lists.harmonyagreements.org] On Behalf Of Amanda Brock
Sent: Wednesday, June 08, 2011 04:01
To: harmony-drafting at lists.harmonyagreements.org
Subject: Re: [Harmony-Drafting] Licensing for website content and agreements

Hi there

I have made my comments in line.

[ ... ]

On 07/06/11 19:25, consiliens wrote:
[ ... ]
> Here's a slight variation on Mark's proposal.
>
*** dh: 1 ***
> "Except where otherwise noted, all content on this site and the 
> agreements are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 
> Unported License. The Project Harmony contribution agreements may be 
> copied and distributed verbatim under the Harmony brand. The Project 
> Harmony contribution agreements may be modified, but modified versions 
> may not distributed under the Harmony brand; provided that such 
> modified versions may include the following notice: "This Contribution 
> Agreement is a modified version of contribution agreements developed 
> by Project Harmony."
I think a simple licence along the lines of Allison's statement is fine, then we can add an attribution statement if this is the general consensus.
>
> The "following notice" section could be considered the required 
> attribution component of the CC BY license.
*** dh:2 ***
The CC licence creates more terms than I think we actually need and I think the model used by GPL is enough. Is there any actual objection to us following the GPL model. Surely this is just another open source model. Again if I am missing something please let me know.
>
> A standard widely adopted license is highly preferable if the goal is 
> "to make it easy for developers and lawyers to review the agreements" 
> (quoted from Allison).  The issue is not "over-engineering" vs 
> simplicity,
I think it is. We don't need a full licence. Go, use it any way you like without changing the wording. If you use it any other way then attribute and note that it is modified.
> it's a question of inequity and rights distribution.  CC BY, according 
> to Allison, "does seem like a close fit to what we've talked about"
> and explicitly grants the public rights to the content in a way that 
> doesn't cause problems with Harmony's right to endorse agreements.
> The "simplicity" of the proprietary all rights reserved no derivatives 
> allowed approach is undesirable and not in the public interest.

*** dh:3 ***
However, if the consensus is that we should use CC, then lets use CC.

[ ... ]
>
> On 06/07/2011 10:12 AM, Radcliffe, Mark wrote:
>> I suggest being more explicit:
>>
>> Except where otherwise noted, all content on this site is licensed 
>> under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. The Project 
>> Harmony contribution agreements may be copies and distributed 
>> verbatim under the Harmony brand. The Project Harmony contribution 
>> agreements may be modified, but modified versions may not distributed 
>> under the Harmony brand; provided that such modified versions may 
>> include the following notice: "This Contribution Agreement is a 
>> modified version of contribution agreements developed by Project 
>> Harmony."
>> .
[ ... ]



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