Legal stuff

[Junilu Lacar]

As much as we'd all probably like to work unconstrained by copyrights and other legalities like that, the reality is that all open source projects have to deal with the legal stuff to avoid problems that could jeopardize or severely compromise the project's goals.

I'm starting this topic to discuss all those kind of things that we must deal with.

I was looking around for project ideas and came across Taiga and their code of conduct which was adopted from the Contributor Covenant. Looks like something we might want to leverage for the Ranch Corral project.

Also, many employers have assignment of inventions and intellectual property rights agreements with their employees. I used to have one of those and I needed a formal written confirmation from my employer that any work I did related to open source projects were exempted from the assignment agreement.  We should probably keep this in mind as this has some pretty serious legal implications. Anyone who contributes to the project should be able to guarantee, in writing, that their contributions are not bound by any such agreements with outside third parties.

[Zach Rode]

There is a list of licenses here

I think we might need to decide what properties we would like our license to have.

Would we allow our project for financial use? Probably not

Would we allow others to branch our project and extend not related to CodeRanch? I don't see why not

Would we require changes tracked? Maybe

Would we require attribution? Probably

Would modifications require the same license? I very adamantly think yes on this.

-Zach

[Liutauras Vilda]

Zach Rode wrote:There is a list of licenses

For the completeness of the list, there is also a few variation of BSD licenses to consider.

[Liutauras Vilda]

Junilu Lacar wrote:I was looking around for project ideas and came across Taiga

Interesting.

Other well known posibly to consider:
Jira - "..free for use by official non-profit organizations, charities, and open-source projects, but not governmental, academic or religious organizations".

[Campbell Ritchie]

How weird; many religious organisations have non‑profit or charitable status, so there is a contradiction there. Also, it seems even stranger not to permit use for academic purposes, viz. teaching and research. I can understand not permitting Governmental use, since Government departments aare more akin to commercial organisations than to charities.

[Liutauras Vilda]

I must say I took licencing information from Wikipedia, that might be innacurate that I thinking now. Probably need to research better in their website if the information holds.

[Stephan van Hulst]

Personally I'm a big fan of the Mozilla Public License 2.0, which I use in most of my own projects. It's free and open source, allows licensees to do what they want with the code, including write their own proprietary code around it, as long as the original code remains under the MPL. It also takes care of some stupid legal corner cases so that the original intent of the license remains enforced.

This would allow others to make money off of code they wrote in separate source files or modules that interact with our stuff, but they can't relicense existing code or code that they have modified.