Jupyter-book: Allow specifying license

[akhmerov]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Especially for publishing OER clearly marking the license is a useful feature. Right now there seems to be no high level way to specify a license, and one would need to modify the template in order to provide it.

806 documents how to achieve the desired document appearance by using low level functionality, but it lack a user-friendly interface.

Describe the solution you'd like

Add a config field with license, or infer it from the LICENSE provided in the repository.

Describe alternatives you've considered

A sphinx extension could be another option.

[choldgraf]

Big +1 on this idea too, a couple of thoughts on this one:

• Folks could hard-code language or a link to their license in the footer with extra_footer. So, perhaps an easy first-step here would be to add documentation that recommends this
• The remaining question is whether / how jupyter-book should treat licenses in special ways. E.g., configure a path to a license.txt file and jupyter book does specific licensey stuff with that

Do you think the first point (adding docs about how to add license information, and best-practices) would be a good first step?

[akhmerov]

Shouldn't the license appear right next to the author and the copyright statement? Is extra footer good enough for that?

e.g. how would one make a footer like this one: © 2017-2019 Delft University of Technology, CC-BY-SA 4.0. without abusing the author config entry?

[choldgraf]

I'd probably just leave copyright blank and put it all in extra_footer, that's what we did in the jupyter governance pages https://jupyter.org/governance/intro.html

[akhmerov]

That's a decent workaround, thanks. Documenting this would be handy, but it would indeed also be cool to try to automatically interpret the license file.

[firasm]

In case someone comes across this issue, here's the relevant snippet in the _config.yml file from the jupyter governance book:

html:
  extra_footer: |
    <p>
    ... Add license info here...
    </p>
sphinx:
  config:
    html_show_copyright: false

html_show_copyright is also nice!

[choldgraf]

I'm gonna close this in https://github.com/executablebooks/jupyter-book/pull/806 - but that just adds documentation to show the pattern we describe in this issue. I think that it may still be a good idea to "special case" a license moreso than this, but perhaps we can tackle that in a different issue that's scoped particularly around that? If you think it's better to tackle here, feel free to reopen.

[akhmerov]

Either way is fine, although I think this issue has all the context, so opening another one is feels redundant.

[choldgraf]

sounds good - if you like you could modify the TLC in that case to clarify that, while this is documented, there's still a different pattern that we should think about supporting (an explicit license)

[akhmerov]

Yep, done.