Store authoritative copies of texts of licenses with process for updating

[rufuspollock]

Suggest /texts/ as a location.

[marctjones]

I would suggest keeping the URIs of the licenses the same. For people using the license they may be linking back to the license. It looks like the license URLS are under the /licenses/ directory now.

• https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/pddl/
• https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/by/
• https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/
• https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/dbcl/1.0/

[pnorman]

I would suggest keeping the URIs of the licenses the same

This is essential.

with process for updating

I recommend against going in to too much detail Open Knowledge is the stewards of the license, and changing a published license is a big process - look at GPL v3, CC v4 as examples. You need to have a lot of people involve with any changes to the text, including legal professionals, external stakeholders, major users, etc.

[rufuspollock]

@marctjones @pnorman there will be no breakage of those urls and they will keep working. However, this issue is about keeping authoritative plain text versions somewhere in the repo where they can get PRs etc. The process of "releasing" a new version and publishing it on the authoritative url would be separate.

Hope that clarifies 😄

Re @pnorman point on process: totally agree and there would be a proper process here.

[pnorman]

However, this issue is about keeping authoritative plain text versions somewhere in the repo where they can get PRs etc

Keeping them in the repo is fine, but they shouldn't ever get a PR except for typographical issues and a new release. The former should be rare once we've fixed the Markdown, and the latter can only come from the ODC advisory council, not individuals.

[rufuspollock]

@pnorman strictly i'd say you could allow a develop "branch" where you were more liberal with any formal release of a new version having a fuller process via ODC advisory council.

[marctjones]

@rufuspollock Ahh okay. I think that makes sense. I misunderstood. Sounds like you just want to designate a internal location for a cannocial copy.

I would suggest keeping a flat copy of every version of each license that ODC has every publicly distributed. I noticed there was a thread about making changes to the DbCLv1.0 a few months ago, and if one of my clients was using the version with the typo, it would frustrate me to no end if I could not find an explanation for the mismatch.^1 The DbCL is a little hidden on the site now, so might not be a good example, but having a way to acknowledge the changes besides git history I think would be helpful.

@pnorman I agree that I would expect new versions would mostly come from the ODC advisory council (except for maybe typos), but having a version to branch that members of the ODC advisory council could work on together in git seems like it would be useful. I know from my personal experience Lawyers spend so much time tracking different draft versions, I often wish I could get collaborators/opposing attorneys to work of a private git repo with pull requests.

Is that what you were thinking @rufuspollock, that the `/text version of the ODC-BY would have been the correct version for me to do a pull request against?

[rufuspollock]

Sounds right @marctjones