2.2. Licensing
This section will provide basics of licensing and legal things in Open Source.
Format
- Read and apply what you learn, to evaluate project licensing for the projects you selected in the previous section.
Prerequisites
Have read and completed ‘Evaluating an Open Project’ activities
- “A Crash Course in Open Source Licensing”
- Watch: How Does the Commons Work?
- Contributor License Agreement
- Assignment: Understand that License!
- Attribution
There’s a lot, and a little to know about licensing - and while it can feel a bit intimidating, or even confusing it’s important to understand what open source licensing is, how it works, and when it doesn’t.
This section will help you establish a basic understanding of open source, Creative Commons and CLA licensing, while providing practical exercises to learn by doing.
“A Crash Course in Open Source Licensing”
Watch: How Does the Commons Work?
Licenses are also about enabling use, and Creative Commons is a fantastic example of that philosophy in action:
“A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted work. A CC license is used when an author wants to give people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that they have created.” - Creative Commons - Wikipedia
There are many great websites that help you search by CC license including Creative Commons Image Search and Visualhunt.
“How Does the Commons Work?” by The Next System Project licensed under CC-BY
Contributor License Agreement
From time to time you will see something called a ‘Contributor License Agreement’ (CLA) as a prerequisite to contributing to an open project. To better understand why a project might use a CLA read : ‘Does my project need an additional contributor agreement?’ from GitHub.
Some projects that use CLAs are:
Assignment: Understand that License!
- Identify the Licenses for each of your chosen projects from the previous activity. AND/OR… these projects:
- Go to https://tldrlegal.com/. Look up each of the above licenses. Identify the “cans” the “cannots” and the “musts” for each.
- For each license, state whether you would (or would not) be comfortable contributing code to that project and why (or why not).
- For each, identify if a CLA is present.
Attribution
Stoney Jackson and Karl Wurst, FOSS2Serve Intro to Copyright and Licensing
next: Community Health