Legal ⚖

Licenses (ɔ)

I have chosen a set of open source licenses approved by both the Open Source Initiative and the Free Software Foundation, each of them used for a specific purpose, so I can cover all the copyright problems that could be presented but without affecting developers’ and users’ freedoms.

Source code license 🐍

Front-end ➡

For the front-end, I use templates designed by the people behind the website templated.co, which all of them are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0, also known as CC BY SA 4.0, which is the same license used by many big open culture websites like Wikipedia, Flickr and Stack Overflow.

Back-end ⬅

For the back-end, I use the Affero Gnu Public License version 3, most known as AGPLv3, which is used by most self-hosted, federated software like Nextcloud, ONLYOFFICE and the Matrix protocol applications.

Database license 🗄

For my databases, I have chosen the Open Database License version 1, most known as ODbLv1. I intentionally chose this license in order gain compatibility and interoperability with the OpenStreetMap database.

Content license 📖

All of my content is licensed under CC BY SA 4.0, just like my front end.

Draft: documentation license 📄

I have made some research regarding which would be the best license for documentation, using as a measure one simple indicator: usage breadth.

If we considered the following sources:

• https://github.com/search
• https://sourceforge.net/directory/
• https://launchpad.net/+search

we would recognise that the Creative Commons licenses are by far more popular than the GNU Free Documentation License.

On the other hand, if we visited these other websites:

• https://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical
• https://www.gnu.org/licenses/

we could arise to the following conclusions:

• The Open Source Initiative has not approved the Creative Commons licenses as open source licenses. However, they have chosen the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License by which their content is licensed.
• The GNU project itself, despite having created an own license, does not use it for the content of its website; instead, it uses the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 4.0 International License.
• The GNU project itself advises that “for essays of opinion and scientific papers”, the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License should be used.

Therefore, considering on one hand the much bigger usage of the Creative Commons licenses, and on the other hand the web-first nature of our website and the low usage of the GNU FDL (even by the GNU project itself), it should be beared in mind adopting a Creative Commons license as the license of our documentation, preferably, the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0, since it ensures that our work will be legally compatible with a wealth of other people’s work, as well as derivative works of our work will have to use the same license.

Despite that, it should be studied the technical differences between the CC BY SA 4.0 and the GFDL.

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