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

[Sam Kuper]

On 21/03/2017, Martin Roth <gaumless at gmail.com> wrote:
> So from the start, I just want to say that I'm not arguing just to
> argue - I want to make sure we pick the correct license here.

Likewise, and thanks for clarifying :)

I appreciate your questions and have done my best to answer them.
IANAL, though...

>>> Is there a reason we shouldn't switch to CC BY 4.0?
>>
>> Arguably, yes: doing so would permit the use of Coreboot wiki material
>> in proprietary works, which some wiki contributors might be opposed
>> to.
>
> [...]
>
> If *SOME*
> contributor to the wiki wanted a penny for anyone who used their
> documentation, should we write that into the license?

No, as that would be a crayon license. See
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/271080#271083

> Is picking BY
> over BY-SA actually going to prevent anyone from contributing?

I can't speak for anyone else, but I would be more hesitant to
contribute under a BY license than a BY-SA one.

> It
> seems like it PREVENTS distribution, since we need to pick the exact
> version of the license selected by other sites so that we can share
> documentation between them.

I think this is a misunderstanding. Like all licenses, it only
prevents usage that is not compliant with the license.

>> It would also prevent importing material from Wikipedia or Stack
>> Exchange into the Coreboot wiki.
>
> Wouldn't selecting CC BY-SA 4.0 also prevent that, if they're licensed
> at CC BY-SA 3.0?

No, it would not prevent *importing* it, as the CC BY-SA licenses are
forward-compatible.

However, it would prevent *exporting* material from the Coreboot wiki
to a CC BY-SA 3.0-licensed resource.

>>> How much of the coreboot documentation is
>>> applicable anywhere else?
>>
>> That remains to be seen. As Coreboot grows in popularity, its
>> documentation is likely to be more widely applicable.
>
> This also seems like an argument for CC BY over CC BY-SA.

I disagree. I'm not aware of any websites on the scale of Wikipedia or
SE that use CC BY.

>>> - Do we really care what Stack Exchange or any other group is using?
>>> How much are we copying from them?
>>
>> At the moment, I don't know of any Coreboot wiki content that was
>> copied from SE or Wikipedia. This is probably just as well, because
>> such material would be in breach of its license ;)
>>
>> But as Coreboot becomes more popular, the likelihood increases that
>> someone might post an answer on SE, or a description on Wikipedia,
>> that is good enough that it is worth including it (either verbatim or
>> appropriately edited) in the Coreboot wiki. For such inclusion to be
>> possible, the Coreboot wiki's license obviously needs to be compatible
>> with SE's license and Wikipedia's license.
>
> I guess I dislike this as a reason for choosing our license.  If some
> future Stack Exchange replacement comes along using a different
> license, what then?  We're stuck with what we've already picked.

It probably makes more sense to make the Coreboot wiki compatible with
the most obvious existing major collaborative websites than it does to
speculate about potential future websites that might never in fact
come into existence.

Besides, there's no guarantee that your hypothetical SE replacement
would use a license that is compatible with CC BY, either.

>> As an aside: it is certainly possible in principle to dual-license (or
>> even triple-license, etc) the Coreboot wiki's content. So, Coreboot
>> could, for instance, decide to use CC BY-SA 3.0 *and* GFDL, with the
>> licensee allowed to choose whichever they prefer. On the plus side,
>> this would avoid the community having to choose between them (i.e. it
>> avoids the "versus" aspect of the discussion you linked to). On the
>> down side, it would prevent bi-directional compatibility with SE, as I
>> pointed out here:
>> https://www.coreboot.org/pipermail/coreboot/2017-March/083614.html .
>
> I'm fine with people dual licensing individual documents, the same as
> we allow someone who creates a new file to choose to license it in
> ways other than GPLv2, but I'd like to have a single license that
> governs the coreboot documentation as well.  Maybe that's not needed,
> I'm not sure.  It seems like we want to be able to say though "By
> contributing documentation here, you agree that contributions are
> licensed as X".

I agree with your position.

> I guess we also need to be careful about copying code into the
> documentation as well, since it seems like nothing's compatible with
> pulling GPL code into it.  At least CC BY allows you to pull the
> documentation into the code if there were ever a reason we wanted to
> do that.

I think that having a footer on the Coreboot wiki along the lines "All
material herein is published under CC BY-SA 3.0 unless stated
otherwise" would cover that eventuality, as long as any GPL code
excerpts in the wiki were clearly marked as such. Best to ask the SFC
for certainty on this point, though.

Thanks again :)