Update licenses and Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) for doc projects

[flicstar]

Update licenses and DCO for doc projects to reference “copyrightable material” instead of “software”.

[camerons]

The problem we face is that we are using licenses and a DCO which reference Open Source "Software" terminology to describe "Documentation". In a legal sense this is okay as "Software" is technically not defined and could be anything, including documentation. However this is confusing for end users.
Proposed solution is to reach out to license providers and ask them to update the language in their licenses.
Draft Open Leter here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/18tHQjjmtj3FPvkHW_FzeC5uUmgCaqnvTbHkT7_eKjro/edit

[camerons]

I've asked Erin to reach out to Google legal (Max S) for advise on draft letter.

[jaredmorgs]

@camerons discussed/clarified this in a meeting:

The current license we use (CC0) is not legally sound according to Google and is not contestible in certain jurisdictions.

@Loquacity suggested that we could use the GFDL (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3.en.html) which is a specific non-attribution license for open-source documentation.

[camerons]

Slight clarification to Jared's comments.
I had originally proposed a CC0 license for our docs, in order to allow downstream projects to use our templates without forcing them to add a license statement on their docs. (I suggest that it sometimes, like on a home page where every word counts, you don't want to add a string of extra license statements.)
Google legal had advised that CC0 is not legally recognized in some jurisdictions, and we followed Google's advice and selected 0BSD instead, which is legally water tight, but ambiguous to a casual reader. (It refers directly to software, not documentation.) Legal get around this by saying that "software" is not defined, so could be anything, including documentation.

[Loquacity]

I would argue that using a software licence for docs is very common, and shouldn't be overly confusing for anyone who cares about licencing (who would not normally be a newbie, in any case). Especially since we are (at least mostly) running with a docs-as-code setup here. So if Google want us to use 0BSD, I don't see that being a problem.

[camerons]

For future reviewers: We've added "The Vault" label to this issue, as it is a decision to be revisited later.

• Let's revisit by March 2021
• Hopefully by then Google contributors can discuss with Google legal who provided original legal advice on license choice.
  • Note: 0BSD is not an option that can be selected from the github pulldown list when selecting a repository, and as such our project doesn't get an open source label applied in the github user interface.