LICENSE

[nathany]

Now that we've consolidated a number of projects, this seems like a good time to revisit licensing.

• The CC0 license for badges
• The license for gh-badges and any additional services (analytics backend or what-not)
• Do we need a CLA for vendors contributing webhooks? (if we move forward with that second form of the API web API design #100 (comment))
• Do we have any license requirements for third-party badge requirements Consolidate Badges as a Service under GitHub organization #88 (comment)

Related to this is setting up a Shields, LLC. #39 (comment)

[nathany]

It could be something like: Copyright 2014 The Shields Authors. All rights reserved.

And then have an AUTHORS file:

$ git shortlog -se | awk '{print $2 " " $3 " " $4}'

Kinda more challenging with several repos though.

[espadrine]

Is there something wrong with going full-public-domain? We wouldn't have to care about copyrights. The only requirement is to specify "CC0" in the project.

[pluma]

Isn't CC0 discouraged for code? The official FAQ suggests otherwise, but still highlights that it is not OSI approved and doesn't deal with patents. It's fine for the badges themselves, of course.

For code you could use Unlicense instead -- it's not OSI approved either, but it seems to be widely used and was explicitly written to cover software.

Edit: disregard that, the FSF recommends CC0.

[espadrine]

@pluma My understanding is that the OSI debates the patent aspect of the fallback clause of CC0, but I have no patent, and, since this is already released under CC0, no right to one.

[olivierlacan]

I started this project with a public domain license, why do we need to complicate this?

I'm against setting up Shields, LLC.

[pluma]

AFAICT CC0 should be sufficient. Sadly "public domain" is not universally a valid option outside the US, so the project should be a bit more specific than that. Being blessed by the FSF and backed by Creative Commons, CC0 is probably the sanest choice.

As the project is already under CC0, I suggest closing this issue.

[olivierlacan]

@pluma Yup! :-)