Licensing for NEW documents

Sorry, I forgot to sign this so it would line-wrap for folks whose email clients won't do it for them.

Also, where I say below that an iCLA is required if a contribution to an Apache project is to be made, there are other ways. A work could be contributed under an SGA (Software Grant Agreement, I think.) The SGA provides a permissive license to Apache that allows the work to be licensed as an Apache project result. It has to be done by someone entitled to do so. (That is what Oracle did in licensing OpenOffice.org to the ASF. Oracle still holds the copyright though and other licenses of the same content are not revocable. That's why the Oracle grant does not interfere with TDF continuing with LO as a derivative of the LGPLd OO.o software. Although new work from AOO under ALv2 will be third-party to TDF, etc., etc.)

From: Dennis E. Hamilton [mailto:dennis.hamilton@acm.org]
Sent: Saturday, November 26, 2011 18:25
To: documentation@global.libreoffice.org
Subject: RE: [libreoffice-documentation] Re: Licensing for NEW documents

I'm not quite clear what Alex is observing about rebranding of the New documents Jean is talking about. Let's break it down into parts.

  If someone who did not hold the copyright made a derivative work of those documents to rebrand them for Apache OpenOffice, change screen shots, etc., they would need to honor the original license. (If it is dual licensed the creator of the derivative has a choice which license(s) to produce the derivative under.)

If someone who held the copyright on the New documents were to make the derivative, they could certainly offer a different (dual) license. By either route, even if one of the available licenses were an Apache ALv2 license, it still would not constitute a contribution to the Apache OpenOffice project. Contribution is a separate act.

Now, to have it also be contributed to an Apache project, there would have to be a contribution agreement (iCLA). Whether that is done or not is a separate decision.
An Apache project, or any other project for which the ALv2 license is compatible could also rely on the new document as a 3rd party work. In the case of an Apache project, this would not happen if the licensor objected.

A final example: If I wrote a new document that applied to LO and licensed it in a way that TDF accepts, I could also rebrand and modify it myself and offer a different license on that version. I am in a position to go farther and contribute the rebranded one to the Apache OpenOffice project too. That involves more steps, even though I have already registered an iCLA with ASF.

[I'm not going to get into how ODF Authors and others might hold joint copyright and how that complicates new licensing and especially contribution to ASF.]

  - Dennis

From: Alex Thurgood [mailto:alex.thurgood@gmail.com]
Sent: Saturday, November 26, 2011 14:35
To: documentation@global.libreoffice.org
Subject: [libreoffice-documentation] Re: Licensing for NEW documents

Hi Dennis,

There is absolutely no requirement to file an iCLA with the Apache Software Foundation in order to use the Apache License v2.0. The iCLA is for contributors to Apache projects. It says so right in the part quoted below. Many projects not carried out as Apache projects use the license. (Compare with using the GPL versus contributing to a Gnu project, the latter generally requiring a license to FSF.)

Sounds like it is best to stick with a Creative Commons license only for LO with the author(s) having the rights to reassign to others as they wish. The problem with reassignment, if I understand copyrights, is that all the holders must agree or it not valid.

I disagree. Dennis has covered well in various notes the situation
with including the Apache license in a dual license arrangement. It is
IMO very much an advantage, not a problem, and avoids exactly the
situation you mention (of perhaps wanting to relicense in future). Of
course, it potentially means that some people (eg Alex) may choose not
to contribute to documents licensed in this way. But I suspect that
most contributors don't and won't care, and of those who do care, most
will be happy with the dual license. Indeed, I suspect that most
contributors to the docs produced by ODFAuthors and the docs being
created here at LO have never paid any attention to the licensing of
those docs.

I'll reiterate my comment in another note that if someone (you, for
example) were to write a new document from scratch and wanted to
license it only under CC-BY-SA, then they can certainly do so.

--Jean

Hi,

Given that we're talking about such a fundamental thing as a change of
license in new LibreOffice documentation, I still reckon it would be
natural to involve the BoD in discussing the idea...

indeed. :wink: Can you maybe post to board-discuss?

Florian

Hi :slight_smile:

I think Alex's objections have been cleared away by Dennis's clarifications
so i suspect that Alex might well be willing to contribute under
dual-licensing. As i understand it the objection was something to do with
individuals having to sign an agreement with Apache but Dennis said that
would not be required. I am a little hazy about that tho!

I think that if employees of a 3rd party company have been ordered to work
on LibreOffice then it's likely that the company has accepted that works
produced by them are not the property of the 3rd party company. The
company's i can think of that are likely to let (or order) employees to work
on LO are ones such as Novel, RedHat, Canonical, Google or perhaps
governments such as the Spanish ones all of whom are quite familiar with and
welcoming of the idea of employees doing work for other companies because it
gives them a better end-product when combined with their own stuff. I'm
never sure about what is going on in Brasil but again it seems to be
positive about this sort of thing. Companies that are really strict about
claiming their employees work as their own are unlikely to be contributing
workers time to this project in the first place. I gather there are some
companies that impose restrictions on what employees do with their free-time
especially if using company equipment. I think employees of such companies
are likely to already be aware of the likelihood of those sorts of
restrictions.

So, i think all objections to dual-licensing have been eliminated but i'm
still not completely certain of that. The pedantry and legalese in this
thread is difficult to understand but from what i can gather i think
dual-licensing of new documentation is possible without any individuals
signing CLA agreements?
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

Hi :slight_smile:
Dohhhh. Please ignore my lengthy previous email!
Apols and regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

Hi Jean,

> Sounds like it is best to stick with a Creative Commons license only for
> LO with the author(s) having the rights to reassign to others as they
> wish. The problem with reassignment, if I understand copyrights, is that
> all the holders must agree or it not valid.

I disagree. Dennis has covered well in various notes the situation
with including the Apache license in a dual license arrangement. It is
IMO very much an advantage, not a problem, and avoids exactly the
situation you mention (of perhaps wanting to relicense in future). Of
course, it potentially means that some people (eg Alex) may choose not
to contribute to documents licensed in this way. But I suspect that
most contributors don't and won't care, and of those who do care, most
will be happy with the dual license. Indeed, I suspect that most
contributors to the docs produced by ODFAuthors and the docs being
created here at LO have never paid any attention to the licensing of
those docs.

I'll reiterate my comment in another note that if someone (you, for
example) were to write a new document from scratch and wanted to
license it only under CC-BY-SA, then they can certainly do so.

I don't understand the whole discussion. If I read the explanation at
http://www.apache.org/legal/resolved.html#cc-sa
correct there is no need for another licensing than CC-BY-SA, is it?
The CC licensing also very common in the environment of writing and publishing.

Regards,
Andreas

CC-SA wasn't discussed, just the consequences of using ALv2, and whether that had any connection with iCLA that are used in the case of Apache projects.

Note that the Apache determination concerning CC-SA acceptability only covers distribution without modification. That probably does not matter to this discussion. With regard to any CC-BY-SA license, it is valuable to have an explicit statement in the work itself how sufficient attribution is to be made. In an Apache release, that will be looked for and honored.

Reassignment is different than adding a license or providing the material under an additional/different license.

Reassignment is about copyright. Let's not go there.

Still, offering a license from a multiple-author work does raise issues about the arrangement among those authors and how such things as assignment and licensing are arrived at. That's whatever the arrangement is and what it allows. I have nothing to say about any matter of that sort.

- Dennis

Hi Dennis, Jean, *,

thus I see no need to change the licensing or double-license with ALv2. There is no
need to do the work outsite the current platform ODFAuthors.org. The contributors to
the OOo documentation are familar with that CMS and it's workflow.

Regards,
Andreas

Hi,

Reassignment is different than adding a license or providing the material
under an additional/different license.

Reassignment is about copyright. Let's not go there.

that would something that would not work in some countries, e.g. Germany. An author
could not give away his authorship. He could only give away the rights to use his
work.

Regards,
Andreas

We're actually talking about *LibreOffice* docs here, which are not
being done (in English) on the ODFAuthors website. Though I guess
there are implications for translations of LO docs that are being done
through ODFAuthors, so that is a good point to consider... one that I
had not previously thought about.

--Jean

Ah, yes... I wasn't talking about reassignment, and failed to note
Jay's use of the term. Perhaps he actually meant "relicense"? It's so
easy to get tangled up in the terminology...

--Jean

On the documentation list, I proposed changing the license for NEW
docs from the legacy licensing (carried over from the OOo user guides
that were revised for LO) to a different license. The proposal has
generated quite a bit of discussion. David Nelson suggested that we
should involve the Board in these discussions, so I am referencing the
thread involved.

http://nabble.documentfoundation.org/Licensing-for-NEW-documents-tp3536793p3536793.html

--Jean Weber

Oops, I sent this to a wrong address. Trying again. --Jean

Jean Weber wrote

On the documentation list, I proposed changing the license for NEW
docs from the legacy licensing (carried over from the OOo user guides
that were revised for LO) to a different license. [snip]

I have gone though the entire thread, and I have both a couple of things to
say and a couple of questions to ask. Although I am a member of TDF Board of
Directors and a TDF spokesperson, at the moment I am speaking as an
independent individual working for the project in the marketing environment.

First, I will express my ideas.

In addition to being a professional marketer, I am a journalist and a book
author. I have studied the legal aspects of documents - and related licenses
- before deciding to use CC BY-NC-SA for all my licensed documents (mostly
presentations).

I think it should be clear that GPL, LGPL, AL and MPL are software licenses,
which have been stretched in their scope to include documents because
someone - definitely not a lawyer - has thought they were appropriate. I am
not familiar with the law of every country, but these licenses are not
compatible - at all - with the Italian law (Codice Civile).

On the contrary, Creative Commons has been developed by Lawrence Lessig in
order to protect copyright in Internet times, because Codice Civile and
similar laws were not contemplating the free distribution and the reuse of
contents. CC is a specific license for documents, and as such should be the
only one used for documents. Using a software license does not simply make
sense, and should be avoided. CC has been studied to be compatible with
Codice Civile and similar laws.

In addition, The Document Foundation is definitely supporting copyleft
software licenses, and actively discouraging the use of so called
"permissive" licenses - which I personally prefer to define as "predatory",
because they steal from the community to give to the rich and wealthy (to
make it easy, the opposite of Robin Hood) - such as the Apache License.

Although we have not discussed the subject at BoD level, I can anticipate
that the foreseeable result of a discussion would be against using Apache
License for documents. I would personally discard a document licensed under
AL, as I discard every document licensed with a software license (because
they are the result of a nonsensical choice).

Of course, each individual is free to choose how to license his work, but I
would really prefer to default to CC and add AL - or any other software
license - only if the individual has a strong motivation to do so.
Defaulting to CC/AL, in my opinion, means to "legally" steal the work of all
people who are not enough knowledgeable about software licenses (in my
opinion, the majority of people involved in documentation).

Second, I will ask questions.

Are we speaking about LibreOffice user guides? In this case, I do think that
it does not even make sense to use Apache License, because LibreOffice is
moving forward from that code base while AOOoI is moving backwards from the
same code base thanks to the insanity of IP sanitization, and the two
programs will differ in a substancial way.

Are we thinking to change the template without explaining to individuals the
consequences - for their intellectual property - of the license
change/addition? I would personally find this EXTREMELY unfair, and I would
personally veto the license change without a clear and visible explanation
of the consequences for their work of AL adoption for documents.

- before deciding to use CC BY-NC-SA for all my licensed documents (mostly presentations).

Most of the lawsuits involving CC Licenses have involved the meaning of
the CC-BY-NC-SA license.

Look at the difference of opinion expressed by the Creative Commons
Foundation, MIT, and the Dutch Collection Society on what that license
means, grants, permits, and prohibits.

Although we have not discussed the subject at BoD level, I can

anticipate that the foreseeable result of a discussion would be against
using Apache License for documents.

OOAuthors is an organization that is independent of both _The Document
Founation_ and _The Apache Foundation_. As such, rulings by either
organization are technically meaningless.

Defaulting to CC/AL, in my opinion, means to "legally" steal the work of all
people who are not enough knowledgeable about software licenses (in my opinion, the majority of people involved in documentation).

The issue is that there is nothing in non-legalese that explains the
consequences of using the different licenses, for documentation, in any
legal jurisdiction.

I would personally veto the license change without a clear and visible explanation
of the consequences for their work of AL adoption for documents.

I'd suggest that there be a document that clearly explains the legal
consequences, in plain English, on using:
* CC-BY-SA by itself;
* AL by itself;
* CC-BY-SA and AL;
* LGPL by itself;

jonathon

Hi :slight_smile:
Perhaps a wiki-page explaining about licensing and copyright in relation to documentation.  Licensed CC-by-blah of course and then given to the Creative Commons people.  Do the CC people already have something to cover their type of licenses that we could summarise on 'our' wiki?  Perhaps our wiki-page could be something like
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/Copyright
So that it might be more widely useful to people outside of the documentation team.  A lot of LO users produce newsletters and things and might be interested.

We would have to include disclaimers and links to legalese or other appropriate materials so that it's clear our wiki is not legally binding but may be useful for trying to look-up and understand the issues (imo)? (lol)
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

Hi :slight_smile:
Perhaps a wiki-page explaining about licensing and copyright in relation to documentation. Licensed CC-by-blah of course and then given to the Creative Commons people. Do the CC people already have something to cover their type of licenses that we could summarise on 'our' wiki? Perhaps our wiki-page could be something like
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/Copyright

Creative commons has descriptions of the various types of CC licenses available. Their goal is allow the copyright owner to specifically allow certain uses by blanket permission such as you are free to copy or distribute but can not modify or resell the work permission. They have several different schemes depending on the owner's wishes. They describe it as "some rights reserved" instead of "all rights reserved." See http://creativecommons.org/ and
http://creativecommons.org/about

AFAIK copyright is covered by both national law and international treaties while software licenses are regulated only by national law without any international treaties. Thus copyright law is more or less harmonized worldwide - the treaties require a degree of harmonization by signatory countries. Thus US copyright law is very similar to UK copyright law. Software licenses are technically contracts between the producer and user. Thus they are governed by national contract law.

toki.kantoor wrote

Jean Weber wrote

The existing user guides are licensed the same as the OOo guides they were
derived from, and the templates include this licensing information on the
Copyright page (GPL and CC-BY dual license).

Note that GPL applied to documentation is void, so it may as well be
removed.

Chris