[okfn-discuss] Changing license

[Rufus Pollock]

On 29/04/08 23:29, Francis Irving wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 06:13:02PM +0100, John Bywater wrote:
>> Hi Francis,
>>
>> Francis Irving wrote:
>>> I'd like to change the license for this project, from GPL to GNU
>>> Affero GPL (version 3).
>>>
>>> http://kforge.net/project/ukparse/services/svn/
>>>
>>> How do I do this?
>>>   
>> We need to ask Rufus to add that license to the list....

Or anyone with system Administrator role (sysadmin) on knowledgeforge via:

   <http://knowledgeforge.net/admin/model/License/>

:) That said at the moment I think just John and myself are admins but 
I've now added you Francis so you can also use the web control panel to 
make these kind of changes too.

>> [- Rufus? ]
> 
> Rufus! :)

Done. GNU Affero GPL (v3) added to the list (at the bottom of the list 
atm due to sorting by id rather than name).

This request also leads me to a general question relevant for both 
KForge, CKAN (and elsewhere):

   *What licenses should be listed?*

Currently opensource.org list must have over 50 licenses many of which 
are barely used. Similarly the list on the Open Definition [1] already 
has 10 or so and this number will surely grow. So there seem to be 3 
options:

1. Only list 'major' licenses.

2. Relatedly: only list license types in the chooser and leave exact 
license to be specified in the project's license file (which should 
exist anyway).

This will also reduce the risk that the kforge value and the value in 
the source get out of sync (as has happened to me ...) when one location 
is updated but the other isn't.

3. List all approved licenses. This results in a large list and the need 
to keep 'resyncing'.

Currently KForge does 1/2 while CKAN does 3 for software but 1/2 for 
content/data. It would nice to have a common approach for the two sites 
(and for elsewhere). What do people think?

~rufus

[1]:<http://opendefinition.org/licenses/ >