License?

[ivarne]

Before you accept too many contributions to this text, you should pick a licence that clearly states how people are allowed to use it, and what rights you want to have to the finished text.

If you at some point want to publish this text as a book (or somehow earn money on it), you should get that permission from everyone that contributes directly as soon as possible. It's a pain to have to rewrite a chapter because you can't get in touch with the person that originally wrote it.

Do you want others that write a book about Julia to copy text from you and include it with (or without) attribution?

I'd recomend one of the creativecommons licences. If you pick one of the Non Commercial licences, you should probably also add a note in your CONTRIBUTING.md file about who has the commersial rights (Either if you want them for yourself, or shared among anyone that has contributed over a certain level).

[chrisvoncsefalvay]

This is all done now. Thanks

[svaksha]

Hi,

On Fri, Dec 26, 2014 at 7:03 PM, Ivar Nesje [email protected] wrote:

Before you accept too many contributions to this text, you should pick a licence that clearly states how people are allowed to use it, and what rights you want to have to the finished text.

@ivarne, You beat me to it - was going to open a PR to ask this same question.

I'd recomend one of the creativecommons licences. If you pick one of the Non Commercial licences, you should probably also

@chrisvoncsefalvay: IANAL, but I wanted to ask some questions:

1. Again, IANAL, but in my limited knowledge of legalese it seems like
   I am breaking the terms of this license from the word go. By
   definition, the cc-by-nc-nd
   (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode)
   prohibits me (or anyone else (except the Author)) from making any
   derivatives or additions, hence no contributions. So, when I fork a
   public repo, make changes (add/delete) to the text, we (all
   contributors, except the Author (you)) have remixed, transformed, or
   built upon the material and by submitting a PR on github, we will
   have publicly distributed the modified material and have made
   "derivatives" that is publicly available, hence broken the terms of
   the license.

In my limited knowledge of legalese, it seems that the ND is more
suited to works of art or music - say, I render an acapella version of
the karnatic Raga Bhairavi that I want to distribute freely to the
public but dont want a DJ (or other people) to remix it with funky
trance beats and redistribute freely, then this license would be a
perfect choice for me. For a crowdsourced (by virtue of being on
github :)) book, less so.

1. Also, by definition, the "BY-NC-SA" requires all adaptations be
   licensed under the same license but the "BY-NC-ND" does not have this
   restriction(?). If so, anyone can make an adaptation (==derivative?),
   change the licence and make it freely available on a private server.
   </thinking out loud>

For both these reasons, I would suggest the CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0
(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/legalcode) which
will allow you to receive contributions from the public, reserve your
rights as the author, not allow commercial forks, not allow a license
change for private adaptations, etc..

Best,
SVAKSHA, who needs a strong cup of coffee after reading all that legalese.

[chrisvoncsefalvay]

@svaksha IAAL, or rather, IUBALBIABN - I used to be a lawyer, but I'm all better now :D Thank you for pointing that out. Good point. I've never done a mixed licence work before. I'm going to do as you suggested. Enjoy the coffee - your next one is on me.

Ps. The classical Indian music example is just a great touch :P