Hello. Welcome to the Licencing Discusion about the Oxford Guide. For
reference, other Licencing Discussions have been recorded:
<http://openguides.org/mail/openguides-dev/2003-December/000163.html>
<http://openguides.org/mail/openguides-london/2003-December/000179.html>
<http://london.openguides.org/?Licensing_Policy>
<http://www.nottinghamguide.org.uk/?Licensing_Policy>
This was supposed to be a completely thought through mail but I'll never
send it if I try and work through all the arguments in my head first...
The long and short of it is that we can't carry on with no statement of
a) Copyright holders [1]
b) a licence
if the site is going to run without hiccoughs for a long time to come
(which I hope, of course, that it will).
To begin with, copyright:
This is slightly tricky to apply in retrospect, for obvious reaons.
Certainly people have occasionally put work that is clearly copyrighted
to others into the Guide; I've sometimes left this content there until
the situation can be discussed properly. Where content is original to
the contributor, the same issue applies. We can't fully control and
licence the work sensibly with such a scattered set of copyright holders
(or at least we could, but it would likely cause problems in the
future). Therefore it is my preference to assign the copyright of all
content contributed to the guide to a single entity. The problem with
that of course is what entity...
Licensing:
We want to allow the best use of our work, focussing on the
non-commercial aspects, but do we want to rule out commerical
redistribution entirely? What about distributing by charging only at
cost? It would be really nice if at some point in the future the guide
could be turned into a paper booklet that could be distributed.
London and Nottingham both use this:
<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0/>
Any objections to using it (or the updated version -
<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/>)?
Let the discussion flow from here...
Dominic.
[1] Actually I'm not that sure about this bit, because it means we can't
include other suitably-licensed work in the guide at all. Nottingham
have the take-all-ownership line, London don't.
