Opensource.guide: [RFC] Getting Started > Legal

[nayafia]

Hey open source maintainers! We would love your feedback on the Getting Started > Legal article. We will leave this open for comments until Sep 1, 2016.

Does anything seem inconsistent with your experience? What is missing? Are there any other helpful resources on this topic?

Feel free to comment and discuss here, or even open a pull request to suggest changes.

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[nayafia]

We also reviewed this content via #20.

[MikeMcQuaid]

Cautious 👍 here; I like the content and think it's great but it's significantly more lengthy/meaty than other pages. I wonder if some of the content could be punted to linking to external resources intead?

[mlinksva]

@MikeMcQuaid in case it helps mitigate the length, this page isn't in the main flow of reading, IIUC. It's a supporting page linked from a few topics where _someone_ involved should look at the legal issues, but most readers can skip the material.

[benbalter]

Which open source license is appropriate for my project?

I'm wondering if we can't lean on choosealicense.com more here. That's what the site's there for and I feel like the copy on the site could benefit from some of the discussion here.

Probably not. For the vast majority of open source projects, an open source license implicitly serves as both the inbound (from contributors) and outbound (to other contributors and users) license.

Can't 💖 this enough.

Two other things potentially worth calling out here:

1. Why you shouldn’t write your own open source license
2. You're welcome to steal any copy from http://ben.balter.com/2014/10/08/open-source-licensing-for-government-attorneys/ if it's helpful.

[mlinksva]

@benbalter it's leaning more on choosealicense.com now than when it started (had copied license descriptions from there). Agree that the copy on that site could benefit from this work, e.g., choosealicense.com doesn't actually walk through any concrete things that would lead one to choose one license over others like this does with dependencies, communities, and company. Nearest open issue there is probably https://github.com/github/choosealicense.com/issues/381

I'm hoping to dedicate some time to choosealicense.com again next month. For now I'd suggest keeping this new material in the guidebook.

Regarding not writing your own open source license, I feel even mentioning is catering to an edge case. It's not something that should even cross the mind of someone just looking to start a project. But I guess could be appropriate as a further link.

[bkeepers]

It's a supporting page linked from a few topics where someone involved should look at the legal issues, but most readers can skip the material.

Actually, I changed that in 9049a76 because I thought it was accidental. Should it be taken back out of the flow?

[MikeMcQuaid]

@mlinksva Good, good to know and that addresses my main concern 👍

[mlinksva]

@bkeepers I think a lot of this material might be better for the troubleshooting section, and the legal hints in other getting started articles strengthened. I'll make another PR trying to do that.

[jessfraz]

For the link for the Developer certificate, docker uses this now: http://developercertificate.org/ I can make a PR to fix it. it's the same thing as git commit -s so it's not some custom docker one anymore.

NM it looks like it already links there, it's just the docker blog post at the bottom is probably too out of date to be included.

[mlinksva]

It's too bad there's no good how-to document for the DCO, as far as I know. Maybe the Docker blog post should be replaced with https://github.com/docker/docker/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md#sign-your-work as an example implementation in further reading. Or just delete.

[jessfraz]

ya that was the best I could find as well

On Mon, Aug 22, 2016 at 1:26 PM, Mike Linksvayer [email protected]
wrote:

It's too bad there's no good how-to document for the DCO, as far as I
know. Maybe the Docker blog post should be replaced with
https://github.com/docker/docker/blob/master/
CONTRIBUTING.md#sign-your-work as an example implementation in further
reading. Or just delete.

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[nayafia]

@bkeepers yeah, I kept it out of the main flow for the reasons mentioned here. It should be taken back out.

@mlinksva if you feel compelled to reorg, have at it!

@jfrazelle thanks for the update, just removed: https://github.com/github/open-source-handbook/commit/adf0131949fe3ef7d73d778c66bd7e226c276fcf

[mlinksva]

I think @bkeepers reorganization into a FAQ section in #82 is a decent approach. I don't have a strong opinion. I'll look again after you decide whether to merge that work.

[nayafia]

Closed per #106.