Voting for a licence

Hello all.

It is your time to help put in your vote on our licence. i.e. our default licence for each new repo. Just to be clear we do NOT plan on changing the licence for nixpkgs or nix. But our other repos will need a licence and this is your opportunity to give let your voice be heard.

This vote will be closed at 2024-05-07T11:00:00Z this should allow everyone to have ample time to give in their vote.

And no we will not be adding in other licences to this poll. That was the purpose of What license should we use?.

  • MIT
  • GPLv3
  • EUPL
  • 0BSD
  • MPL
0 voters
4 Likes

Dropping this link here since the original thread is closed

A major difference between MIT & 0BSD seems to be (according to the link) that 0BSD covers code (source & binary form) while MIT covers code + documentation (named “Software”). The article also touches on licensing code and documentation separately (e.g. MIT+CC-BY-SA).

Is this poll about code licensing, documentation licensing or both?

2 Likes

“default licence for each new repo” implies both, to me. Personally I think there may be worth in considering different licenses for code vs docs, although I also assume “default” allows for that leeway.

1 Like

I don’t think there is a meaningful difference between code and documentation in this case. The person who left that StackExchange comment you refer to themselves said:

EDIT: I want to mitigate a little bit this assertion. I Am Not A Lawyer. Choose A License, the GitHub initiative, suggests that any open source software license is suitable for documentation:

Any open source software license or open license for media (see above) also applies to software documentation. If you use different licenses for your software and its documentation, be sure to specify that source code examples in the documentation are also licensed under the software license.

2 Likes

That would depend on what is in the repo. Tools (as in standalone programs) seem fine to be copyleft. But I am hesitant to use any Nix code under a copyleft license, even for open-source work, because it is really unclear when the GPL’s “linking and derivative works” clause(s) kick(s) in for something of this nature.

8 Likes

agreed. none of these licenses are very fitting to documentation. i much rather see something like a creative commons in this department

7 Likes

i hadn’t actually thought of this before. it may be something important to consider in regards to SIG repositories for example

6 Likes

A few links for reference:

1 Like

When creating the poll the intention was less for licensing documentation but code, particularly because thats where the prior discussion was leaning. However, I think SIG: Documentation would be a good place to have a vote or discussion on documentation licensing.

cc: @coded @minion

7 Likes

Same here. Tools make sense, but if other material starts going copyleft and the state is more or less “well, new stuff could go either way”, then I can’t make actual use of anything aux.

I’ll stop by and throw around some likes every now & then though :slight_smile:

2 Likes

Just so everyone knows you can change your vote if you think there is a better fit.

1 Like

9 posts were split to a new topic: Voting and ensuring integrity

Classic haha, the best kind of work

1 Like

I think the Fedoraproject is a good place to look at when it comes to legal stuff.

The fedora developer portal licenses all of it’s documentation as GPL 2 and the fedora wiki licenses everything as CC BY-SA 4.0 International.

They also have a dedicated wiki page explaining the different licenses they allow and for what reasons.

2 Likes

Can we have a runoff vote with the top 2 votes once the voting ends?

4 Likes

I think that is probably the most straightforward way to handle this right now.

I do want to repeat, my understanding is this is a feedback tool not a final-decision poll. There’s still no governance setup for handling this as a final decision poll.

As a feedback poll I think its doing a great job. I didnt realize how many people were in support of GPL or MPL.

2 Likes

Due to the considerations of Voting and ensuring integrity, I think a follow up poll will be a good idea too. But like Jeff I also don’t want to repeat this current poll.

2 Likes

We discussed this a little yesterday in call, didn’t we? I had believed the conclusion was to be compatible with the NixOS Wiki by using the same license (which is MIT)

3 Likes

For those that require MIT they can stay MIT for compatibility, otherwise software and original works produced by Aux can be GPL right?