543181 - [dashboard] explicitly license the dashboard code, triple license

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Mozilla Localizations :: Infrastructure, defect, P1)

Description

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

Attachment: Add a bsd LICENSE file to the tld.

We should explicitly license the dashboard code. So far, we have only contributors from moco, employees or contractors, so it's mofo's call.

Referencing the discussion in .legal, http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.legal/browse_frm/thread/bd2afc19ab7d2c06#, I think the vital point is that the community uses BSD to create interchangable apps to put together to create sites.

Given that it's webserver code, the copyleft of the triple license doesn't really buy us much, too.

Already discussed with the contributors, Gandalf, Stas, SethB via mail.

Comment 1

[Seth Bindernagel]

Does this bug need to be moved to Mozilla legal team's bug queue?

Comment 2

[Luis Villa [Outside Counsel; for non-law use [e-mail]]]

If:
* we're the sole copyright owners, and 
* we're not really depending on anyone else's code with a problematic license (i.e., nothing in here is GPL, right?) 

Then this is a policy call (presumably gerv, though see current discussion on governance: http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.governance/browse_thread/thread/b55c9a359baabd58 ) rather than a legal call.

Comment 3

[Zibi Braniecki [:zbraniecki][:gandalf]]

(In reply to comment #2)
> If:
> * we're the sole copyright owners, and 
> * we're not really depending on anyone else's code with a problematic license
> (i.e., nothing in here is GPL, right?) 

I think that in both cases the answer is "yes".

Comment 4

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

Now that the MPL update plans are public, we should get back to this.

Gerv, which of the things you guys have in stock is of impact here? I suspect that one is the license headers, are there others?

I still think that being able to share the code we develop with other django-based sites is valuable, and it makes copying and pasting code that we find less mentally stressful.

Bug 539671 (zamboni, amo rewrite) seems to be in the same bucket. As might be the sumo rewrite.

I found a bunch of django-related apps on github using a license like http://github.com/django-extensions/django-extensions/blob/master/LICENSE. Not sure what that is.

Comment 5

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is what I said to Jeff yesterday:

Hi Jeff,

I owe you a reply about web app licensing from the mozilla.legal newsgroup. My apologies for the long delay.

Having chatted about it with Luis, our view is that we think it's reasonable, when writing code for use in another community, to respect that community's choice of licensing. But we think a core Mozilla web app should be tri-licensed, for consistency with other Mozilla code (sort of the same principle).

So reusable modules can be BSDed or MITed according to language/framework community standards, but the core should be tri-licensed.

As you know, one of the things we hope to fix about the MPL in the revision process (which was planned but not public when you posted your question) is the overwhelming nature of the boilerplate text.

Gerv

Comment 6

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

Background information:

The design of the webapp is such that it's a bunch of more or less loosely coupled applications, aka reusable modules. But finding people that want to run pieces of our site is probably an academic problem. Maybe the pushes app is, but that's interfacing with hg code, which is GPL, so there we're better off with a license including the gpl anyway.

Thus, we should just go for triple-licensing of all of it.

Gerv, given that we need a license today, that means that I'll need to put a license header on all files, right? Do we need to fill out the contributors or is hg logs for that good enough?

Another question, I'm about to take code from http://www.djangosnippets.org/snippets/1289/, which is governed by http://www.djangosnippets.org/about/tos/. Not sure what that means in our context?

Comment 7

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Axel: yes, please put a licence header on all files from http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/boilerplate-1.1/. You don't need to fill out the "Contributors:" line unless people specifically ask you to add them.

If the code you've taken from djangosnippets does not have a specific licence attached, then just roll it in. If it does, then tell me which one it is and what it says.

Gerv

Comment 8

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

Taking.

This will be a rather massive patch, as it not only includes adding a license header, but also a non-empty docstring, because otherwise, the license header shows up as docstring. And that's wrong.

On the positive side, what's wrong about good docstrings?

Comment 9

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

First push is http://hg.mozilla.org/l10n/django-site/rev/f3b927090ad5. Leaving open to go through the templates at least, too.

Comment 10

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

http://hg.mozilla.org/l10n/django-site/rev/a2fca9b74d9e has the templates.

I'll resolve this bug now, there are a few more things to do explicitly, most notably licensing the simile tags. Those should really be BSD as simile is, which is gonna be easier after we have bug 563236, add_media command, at which point both the html/js and the django code can move into one app.