License for GitLab Docs
Changes
- We decided to move all technical content to docs.gitlab.com, not having any of them on the blog anymore. (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/gitlab-docs/issues/89)
- We decided to publish content written by community writers on the docs too. (gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com!5376 (merged))
- For both, we created "Technical Articles", a way to publish guides, tutorials, and tech overviews on the docs site. (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/merge_requests/9984)
The problem
By moving technical articles to the documentation, we need to guarantee that the content reproduced (partially or entirely) somewhere else needs to provide attribution to GitLab and link back to the original article.
GitLab CE is licensed under MIT, which states:
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
It's my understanding that any person can reproduce any content, including the ones we paid for (community writers), and even sell that content, free of charge, and free of attribution to GitLab. The only thing required is to include the MIT license in their repo or website root.
The ideal solution
License GitLab Documentation under CC BY 4.0 or CC BY-SA 4.0, which requires attribution to the original source. It seems to me that we cannot have 2 different licenses in one project.
The non-viable solution
Change GitLab CE license to CC4
Other possible solutions
- Create a separate repository for technical articles. This option was discarded previously as we won't be able to update the content whenever we have changes in GitLab, the product.
- Do as we do for pages.gitlab.io: "The contents of the website's source code (HTML, CSS, Javascript) are licensed under MIT, and the text under CC BY-SA 4.0." (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/gitlab-docs/merge_requests/68 addresses that, in case we can go for it)
- Don't do anything: keep it MIT and be aware that our content can be reproduced anywhere without attribution. For that, we'll have to cut off the "Content Ownership" clause from the community writers terms and conditions (review apps link).
cc/ @axil @seanpackham @JobV