Add full set of Creative Commons licenses as both templates and selection
Problem to solve
Currently, based on licenses available and detected, GitLab is currently suitable only for code. But there is no reason that only code would be stored in git repositories. GitLab is great for collaboration also on other creative works. For those works, Creative Commons is a popular set of licenses to use.
It would be great if those licenses would be fully supported by GitLab.
Intended users
Non-developers who are using GitLab for other types of creative works.
Further details
The problem is that GitLab is currently using licenses available on choosealicense.com, but those licenses are targeting only software, and only "free" licenses. (There is also an issue #17443, but that is a separate issue.) This is limiting because other creative works might other needs than just being licensed as "free" license.
So, among all CC licenses, only the following are available there:
- CC0
- CC-BY
- CC-BY-SA
But other licenses are missing:
- CC-BY-NC
- CC-BY-NC-ND
- CC-BY-ND
- CC-BY-NC-SA
The reason is probably not listed because NC (non-commercial) makes it a non-free license, and ND (non-derivative) might look like it makes no sense on a platform like GitLab where the main idea of collaboration is based on forking and merging.
I would claim that this is unrealistic restriction and that there is no reason why authors of their creative works would not decide that they want to publish source files for their creative works publicly, but forbid others to use them for commercial reasons. Or that they would publish their work on GitLab, allow public sharing of their work, but do not (legally) allow others to modify their work and publish it modified.
I think that to be more welcoming to other types of users, those licenses should be supported.
What does success look like, and how can we measure that?
We would see more repositories with creative works being published on GitLab.