RationalizeDocumentationLicensing

Summary

We need to rationalise the licensing policy in Ubuntu documentation.

Rationale

Currently the dual licensing procedure (see DocumentationTeam/Licensing) is not serving any purpose, and it makes it difficult to incorporate single license source material from elsewhere.

The Ubuntu forum uses CC-By-SA as the license, and so does the Official Ubuntu Book, so adopting that would mean that we can incorporate these two prominent sources of material. It is possible that the wiki material will move to this license (subject to CommunityCouncil approval). Also, we like this license. There seems to be broad agreement among the docteam that moving to this single license would be beneficial. See this mailing list thread among others, discussed at docteam meetings.

The WikiLicensing question, currently stalled at the CommunityCouncil mailing list, also needs to be resolved.

Use cases

  • Matthew sees an informative post on the forum and would like to incorporate it into the Ubuntu help wiki at https://help.ubuntu.com/community. However the licensing on this wiki is unclear so he can't.

  • Corey would like to use material from the Official Ubuntu Book in the system documentation, but can't because of the latter's dual licensing system.

Scope

System documentation, wiki documentation.

Design and Implementation

In relation to the system documentation:

  1. Consult as many previous authors of the documentation as possible to obtain their permission.
  2. Switch the licences to CC-By-SA

In relation to the wiki documentation:

  1. Press the CommunityCouncil for a response to emails

  2. Implement the WikiLicensing spec

Unresolved issues

BoF agenda and discussion

CategorySpec

RationalizeDocumentationLicensing (last edited 2008-08-06 16:23:01 by localhost)