[coreboot] Coreboot wiki: what license is the content under?

[Sam Kuper]

On 01/04/2017, Nico Huber <nico.h at gmx.de> wrote:
> On 01.04.2017 01:39, Sam Kuper wrote:
>> On 31/03/2017, Nico Huber <nico.h at gmx.de> wrote:
>>> On 31.03.2017 23:38, Sam Kuper wrote:
>>>> On 31/03/2017, David Hendricks <david.hendricks at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> On Fri, Mar 31, 2017 at 10:20 AM, Sam Kuper <sam.kuper at uclmail.net>
>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>> Also, to further address Patrick's point above about marketing
>>>>>> material: it is important that the provenance of information about
>>>>>> Coreboot can be established. This is a reputational matter. That
>>>>>> means
>>>>>> it is important that people should not legally be able to
>>>>>> misrepresent
>>>>>> Coreboot contributors' views, etc,
>>>>>
>>>>> Both CC-BY and CC-BY-SA have "no endorsement" clauses
>>>>
>>>> Yes, but because CC BY imposes no restrictions on *second*-derivative
>>>> works,
>>>
>>> [...]
>>> I'm not convinced. Relicensing adapted
>>> work under different conditions would require the explicit permission
>>> by the copyright holder.
>>
>> No, it wouldn't. That's what makes CC BY different from CC BY-SA.
>
> So it changes copyright itself?

Absolutely not!

Like any such license, it relies on copyright law to grant the
*recipient of the licensed work* certain rights (a.k.a. freedoms).
I'll explain this in more detail in the next few paragraphs, but
before that, here's a tl;dr right up front.

<BEGIN TL;DR>

Read the "human-readable summaries" of CC BY and CC BY-SA, and spot
the difference:

- https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

- https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

<END TL;DR>

In the case of both CC BY and CC BY-SA, the rights granted to the
*recipient of the licensed work* include the freedom to create
adaptations and to distribute or publicly perform them, subject *only*
to a small list of restrictions. CC BY has a shorter list of
restrictions than CC BY-SA.

CC BY-SA's list of restrictions includes a restriction on the license
under which an adapted work can be distributed or publicly performed.
See §4.b "only under the terms of: (i) this License; (ii) a later
version of this License with the same License Elements as this
License; (iii) a Creative Commons jurisdiction license (either this or
a later license version) that contains the same License Elements as
this License (e.g., Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 US)); (iv) a Creative
Commons Compatible License."

CC BY's list of restrictions does not include such a restriction.


As such, CC BY grants the creator of an adapted work the freedom to
publicly performed or distribute that adapted work under a different
license.


(Put in more traditional terms, CC BY-SA is a copyleft license; CC BY
is a permissive license.)


>>> And I can't find that permission in CC BY.
>>
>> See, especially, §1(a), §1(c), §1(h), §3(b), §3(d), and §4(b):
>> https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode
>
> Seriously, I ask for a single thing and you want me to search the answer
> in six places?

I was trying to be helpful. I did not write the license, and I am not
responsible for how it is laid out. Don't shoot the messenger. Read
those clauses, and they'll basically answer your concern without you
having to read the rest of the license.

Alternatively, read the whole license; it is commendably short. Or,
just compare the "human-readable summary" of CC BY 3.0 with that of CC
BY-SA 3.0, as suggested in my TL;DR above.




> If
> you really doubt the usefulness of CC BY, please take that to CC.

I don't doubt its usefulness. I do, however, severely doubt that it is
a wise choice for the Coreboot wiki content.

I think it is a great license for a creator who only cares about
receiving attribution for some work itself and for first derivatives
of that work, and who is fine with provenance and credit disappearing
or mutating after that. Such people do exist. (If I were writing a
throwaway piece - maybe a poem or a song - and I liked the thought of
pieces of it being adapted and then adapted again, such that my
adapters' adapters wouldn't have to credit me, I might be tempted to
use CC BY.)



>> (And I think you mean "licensing" rather than "relicensing", assuming
>> we are both talking about the first time that the *adapted work* is
>> licensed to the public.)
>
> No, I meant relicensing. If you license adapted work you "relicense" the
> parts which you don't have the copyright for.

Respectfully, I think you are still mistaken about this. "Relicensing"
describes a new license is applied to a work (i.e. without the work
needing to be altered). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relicensing
.

In the case of an adapted work, alteration has necessarily occurred,
so when a license is applied to the *adapted work* for the first time,
that is not a relicensing. Moreover, this license would apply to the
entire *adapted work*, not just to parts of it.



> I appreciate that you started this discussion.

Thank you. I appreciate your work on Coreboot. (And while I'm
expressing appreciation: I also very much appreciate the effort that
Coreboot volunteers have put into the wiki over the years.)



> Having a license for our
> documentation is really something we should have paid more attention to.

Absolutely.



> Discussing implications of particular licenses, however, is OT here.

Not really. I started this thread precisely to address the problem
that the Coreboot wiki's content is under no clear license. That would
be a legal risk for any wiki, or for any free software project. In
Coreboot's case, it is also a concern for me, as a contributor to the
wiki, as a user of the software, and as a free software advocate
generally (because Coreboot is so fundamental in the free software
stack). I don't want Coreboot to face legal or reputational risk, or
malevolent co-option, or incompatibility with other collaborative
works, because of a failure to put a suitable license in place. I care
about this, and I'm trying to catalyse a robust solution.

It is right and proper that Coreboot participants should discuss the
merits of potential licenses for Coreboot wiki content, and the
Coreboot mailing list is a perfectly reasonable place to do that. I
hope we all have enough netiquette to confine the bulk of the
discussion to a single thread (this one), so that anyone who doesn't
want to follow it can mute this thread and proceed undisturbed.

Discussing the merits of potential licenses for Coreboot wiki content
necessarily involves clarifying the implications of those licenses for
that content and for the project, especially where misunderstandings
exist, as is the case here in relation to CC BY.


Regards.