Licensing

[anarresian]

This PR is a first pass to document licenses for community-platform project.

Changes:

• added license to root directory. I added GPLv1 or later or Artistic 1.0, because I found it in dist.ini and it seems the intended license for the project, where no other is specified.
• added license to /src. I found in bower.json that the intended license for js and visual stuff in /src is MIT.
• added sections to README about licensing.
• reviewed all project and found third party components, added information about their licenses.

Please advise if the intentions were different than what I found.

There are some things left to do, like:

• images, or are all images in community-platform supposed to be covered by Artistic 1.0/GPL 1 or later licenses?
• fonts (/root/static/fonts/, /share/annifont.ttf), are there licenses for fonts? are there 3rd party fonts or were they designed in-house? I found SIL OFT at a cursory search, but I didn't review fonts yet.
• in lib/DDGCTest/Database.pm, there's a note about wallpapers being CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0, I don't know what wallpapers is that text talking about, are they in a repository on github?

[GuiltyDolphin]

Zeh https.

[anarresian]

Fixed, thanks! I must have copied it from dist.ini. Do you want it fixed there too?

[tagawa]

Hi @aanarres. Thanks for checking. I've just submitted a PR (#1374) for dist.ini so that your PR can focus on licensing.

[tagawa]

This all looks good to me but given that it's legal text, I'd like to get further review. /cc @jbarrett

[alohaas]

ping @jbarrett ! any input?

[GuiltyDolphin]

Looks like the year and holder hasn't been updated here.

[alohaas]

@GuiltyDolphin good catch.

[anarresian]

@GuiltyDolphin you're right, it's better to fill these blanks. I committed a change where (c) holders are credited similarly with another part of community-platform. Please do tell if it's reasonable enough or something else should be mentioned.
Edit to add: I think it would be simpler to keep only DuckDuckGo Community, of which DuckDuckGo Inc is a part. Up to you though, I generally didn't remove a (c) holder, absent other clear reasons, because of course I can't do that. :)

[GuiltyDolphin]

@aanarres Oh, I can't really comment - I'm not a member of the platform; I'm just a bit nosy 😉

[nilnilnil]

I have a question. We've preferred using Apache 2.0 because of the trademarks clause. We want to develop free software! We don't however want that software redistributed under our brand.

I don't see any particular protection regarding that here. What can we do about that?

[anarresian]

@nilnilnil Well, there isn't a need for a copyright license to talk about trademarks. Many projects manage these concerns separately. Trademarks need protected on their own anyway, no matter if the copyright license says there are trademarks or not.

There are cases of projects licensed under an open source license that doesn't mention trademarks, and where the project's stewards had trademarks on names in the source, who have required someone who forked the project to stop using their trademarks when distributing. Of course, successfully. I don't know of any case who hasn't been successful for this reason.

That said, there are licenses that do indeed include "just in case" text in the copyright license. Some go further than Apache 2.0 even, and add clauses like "Neither the name of the copyright holder nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission" (BSD), which is actually a trademark-like restriction, or conceptually closer to trademark than copyright.

To address that you feel important to except them explicitly, I suggest to add text to this effect in another file of the project. Can be README file, or can be a new file that will contain the credits and licensing of included components and a statement on trademarks.

There are other ways:

• add a clause to existing licenses. I can't recommend this option, because this concern can be addressed otherwise than creating a new license. A new license is something that everyone else will then have to interpret instead of relying directly on the known names of existing licenses;
• relicense with a license mentioning trademarks. I don't know if it's wanted or if it's easy to do, it depends what contributions are in this project.

[nilnilnil]

@aanarres thanks for the follow-up. As you can tell, we talked about it a bit, and think this is the right move. Thanks for your thoroughness.