openstack team mailing list archive

[Anne Gentle <anne@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all -
I wanted to follow up on the item from this week's board meeting that
affects documentation contributions. I'm personally glad for this
clarification as it makes explaining doc licensing much simpler.
Here's the line from the informal notes.

- Approved the Creative Commons CC-BY license for the documentation
and content license going forward

What does CC-By mean? It's the closest to Apache2 licensing. It's
found here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/. It means
that people can copy, distribute, transmit and adapt the work or use
it for commercial purposes as long as attribution remains.

What do we need to do to make this happen? There are still some areas
we'll work out - for example, once the Foundation has a decent
membership tracking system, the CI team will update the CLA to reflect
this change. Also we need to check Transifex to see if translation of
the documentation can have this same license applied. We should also
discuss what we mean by attribution in the docs - is it per
individual? I'll also ensure our doc tools can indicate CC-By and link
to the license. I also need to investigate how we want the doc tools
to handle attribution. I don't have exact timelines for this change
but want to ensure you know I'm happy to help with questions as we go.

How does it affect what's already in the codebase? If you've already
contributed to documentation, it's apache2 licensed, unless the
original work was a CC license, then the original license is honored.

What about other CC licenses? My understand is that we can continue to
accept other CC-licensed works in the documentation, but people
signing the new CLA will understand their doc work is CC-By. Please
correct me if needed.

I'm happy about moving forward with licensing and ensuring we all
understand how it works.

Thanks,
Anne