Talk:Licensing

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DRAFT of new Licensing text as per the discussion at the 9 June 2011 SLOBs meeting

Sugar Labs adheres to the principles of Free Software. An overview of these principles is provided by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The Open Source Initiative (OSI) has a set of guidelines for Free and Open Source software that characterize the intentions of our community.

All software and content distributed by Sugar Labs, including activity bundles uploaded to http://activities.sugarlabs.org, must be released under a license that conforms to the principles and guidelines referred to above.

You may use any license on the Fedora Project's list of Good Licenses or the FSF's list of Free Software Licenses. If you wish to use a license not on one of these two lists and believe that it fits our guidelines, please contact the Oversight Board.


This policy was determined during a 2009-12-11 board meeting and clarified at the 2011-06-09 board meeting.

Please contact the Oversight Board if you have questions about our licensing policy.



+1 to the above text from me! bernie 03:29, 15 June 2011 (EDT)

+1 from Cjb, with the fix to one of the links that I just made. Cjb 09:45, 15 June 2011 (EDT)


The language seems sloppy to me. Fedora lists both good and bad licenses on the linked page, so saying "You may use any license" from there is not quite what is meant. Secondly, the FSF link goes only to the GNU licenses, perhaps their list of Free Software Licenses is more appropriate? Bert 09:15, 24 June 2011 (EDT)

Sorry. I realize I had the wrong link. Should be http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html which includes many non-GNU licenses. --Walter 09:21, 24 June 2011 (EDT)
The problem with the Fedora link was a typo. Should link directly to http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing#Good_Licenses now. --Walter 09:23, 24 June 2011 (EDT)
Maybe just to be explicit, write "Good Licenses" instead of "acceptable licenses"? Bert 09:54, 24 June 2011 (EDT)
Yes. I agree... consistency. --Walter 10:02, 24 June 2011 (EDT)

Another nit pick: I find the second link to the GNU.org website distracting and unnecessary. I'd replace "is found on the GNU.org website" with "is provided by the FSF". The FSF is mentioned again later, so it's better to use the same name. Bert 10:04, 24 June 2011 (EDT)

Nitpicking is right... but I made the change :) --Walter 10:51, 24 June 2011 (EDT)
That's better, though I'd remove that link altogether. It adds nothing to the official Sugar Labs Licensing page. My suggestion was "is provided by the FSF", with no embedded link at all. Bert 11:11, 24 June 2011 (EDT)
Sure... less is more. But I decided to spell out our acronyms when first used (and OSD->OSI) :P --Walter 11:19, 24 June 2011 (EDT)

+1, having Fedora list of good licences will simplify workflow on ASLO to make it automatic, ie, activities-testing.sugarlabs.org sees to the licence tag in the activitiy.info to accept/reject any new upload. alsroot 09:32, 24 June 2011 (EDT)

+1 FWIW MartinDengler 20:48, 25 June 2011 (EDT)