Re: [legal-discuss] [OpenStack-docs] Licensing of documentation

20 Mar 2015

      ----- Original Message -----
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From: "Anne Gentle" <annegentle@gmail.com>
To: "Steve Gordon" <sgordon@redhat.com>
On Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 4:47 PM, Steve Gordon < sgordon@redhat.com > wrote:
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----- Original Message -----
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From: "Nick Chase" < nchase@mirantis.com >
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First off, I can't speak to the Ops Guide but the Design Arch Guide was
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all people who'd signed the CLA, I believe, though that's by
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happenstance and not by any causation.
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As far as what I remember about the previous expedition:
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In order for us to officially change the license, we needed to find a
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way to:
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a) Add the new license to the overall CLA and get everyone to sign it
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b) Get everyone to sign a separate new CLA that specified the new license
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or
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c) Find a way to ensure that new contributors knew that their content
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was going under a different license than the code.

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Per other comments, this seems like an odd requirement given how we
currently
handle the code - that is the CLA certainly doesn't specify that we're
using
ASL 2.0 today.

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Making things further complicated was the fact that some books (the API
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Guide?) have substantial amounts of code and need to ALSO have the ASL,
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even if we add the CC-BY for the prose part.

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Currently the API Reference is actually the example of a guide that doesn't
expose any license boiler plate at all, ASL 2.0 or otherwise (fun).
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And of course any license changes needed to be approved by the board,
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which is, I think, where we eventually ran aground.

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This is where I get confused because things go a bit circular. Using CC-BY
for documentation was already approved by the board, in 2012 no less
[1][2],
and at some point (apparently) a letter was drafted to the board explaining
the steps required to execute (I assume this was the outcome of your work)
but it's unclear to me what if anything happened next. Was it presented to
the board and rejected?

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That, and I think the final question was, "Why do we need to do this,
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again?"

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This pre-dates my involvement, and Anne only touches on it in the email I
can
find [1], but from my point of view even if the ultimate answer is no we
want to stick with ASL 2.0 for documentation we need to resolve the current
hodge podge of licenses being exposed on docs.openstack.org . We currently
have examples of all of these cases:

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- Guides that expose ASL 2.0.
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- Guides that expose CC-BY-SA 3.0.
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- Guides that expose both.
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- Guides that expose no license at all.

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What's still not clear to me at the moment is *how* to proceed with that.
Okay, I think we're getting closer to what we want. Then we can put a plan in
place for the outcomes.
I personally want contributors to understand how their doc contributions get
licensed, but perhaps the output is the only way to do that.
Some guides will purposely expose both due to having code and content, is
that problematic for you still Steve?
Per Richard I'm not sure it's *necessary* but I don't believe it's a problem either. Perhaps though if doing this it would be good to make it clear in the boilerplate what is licensed as CC-BY (the prose) and what is licensed as ASL (code samples) and use that across the board? Ideally what I would like to get away from is having inconsistent licensing headers across the docs suite leading to the question "is this intentional/reliable".
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I checked on the CC-By ability of the clouddocs-maven-plugin and it can do
CC-by, but only 3.0 currently. Bug logged:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/openstack-manuals/+bug/1433868
My recollection is we were always after 3.0 so while future proofing the toolchain is good I think this is OK for now :).
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How about this: I'll take a stab at the desired state for each guide. Then
for each guide we can say what has to be done to get to desired state.
That would be great, I think this would be very helpful for framing where we go next.
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I'll use https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Documentation/ContentSpecs as a
starting point. I won't write up a blueprint or spec yet since this is
"just" bug fixing for now, as long as we get agreement on each guide's
license.
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The only place where I still need legal guidance is whether I need an
audit-able trail for the license assignment, does anyone know? For example,
if I change the Ops Guide to CC-by, do I have to get agreement from all the
contributors to the Ops Guide?
I'm also not sure on this, like Nick I think everyone who was involved in the Arch Design Guide, by co-incidence, had signed the CLA (we should verify this though) and this should alleviate this concern but I am unclear on whether the same holds for the Ops and Security guides.

Thanks,

Steve
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Let me know your thoughts. Thanks all for the input.
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Anne
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-Steve

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[1]
http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-docs/2013-September/002904.ht...
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[2]
https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Governance/Foundation/15Oct2012BoardMinutes#...

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The desired outcomes are:
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- every reader knows the license
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- all people (corporate contributors, publishers) know if and
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how to reuse
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the docs
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To be honest from previous discussions (which I believe kicked
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off Nick's
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expedition) I thought we had this nailed but now I'm more
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confused than when
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we started as it seems like we remain in complete limbo on this.
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Currently
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we have:
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- Some books reporting ASL 2.0: E.g.
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http://docs.openstack.org/high-availability-guide/content/
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- Some books reporting CC-BY-SA: E.g.
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http://docs.openstack.org/openstack-ops/content/
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- Some books reporting BOTH: E.g.
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http://docs.openstack.org/admin-guide-cloud/content/
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...and I have no idea which ones are correct. The earlier
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replies seemed to
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indicate we should be displaying both, but more recent ones seem
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to indicate
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we should be only displaying ASL 2.0. So in both my roles, as a
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downstream
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and as a contributor I can now count myself as thoroughly confused.
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So sorry Steve, it _is_ confusing.
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I'll give this my full attention when I'm back next week. Feel free to
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get more clarification here though! It's completely possible I'm not
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remembering everything.
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Anne
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-Steve
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- every contributor knows their rights when they write
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upstream docs
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- contributors are not held liable if the docs are wrong
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- use of the OpenStack brand and logo still go through normal
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brand
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guidelines
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That's all I can think of for now. Let me know if there are
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additional
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questions or difference in opinion on the outcomes we need.
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Anne
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--
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Steve Gordon, RHCE
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Sr. Technical Product Manager,
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Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform
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OpenStack-docs mailing list
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--
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Steve Gordon, RHCE
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Sr. Technical Product Manager,
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Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform
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_______________________________________________
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OpenStack-docs mailing list
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OpenStack-docs@lists.openstack.org
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--
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Steve Gordon, RHCE
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Sr. Technical Product Manager,
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Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform
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-- 
Steve Gordon, RHCE
Sr. Technical Product Manager,
Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform