Audit all CNCF docs projects for correct license documents

[celestehorgan]

Per https://github.com/cncf/techdocs/blob/main/howto/repo-setup.md#license-files and cncf/project-template#12, use the project tracking spreadsheet to audit existing projects for license compliance.

Questions to answer prior to starting this task:

• Do we want to bring old projects into compliance or only tackle new ones?
• Do we want to note any exceptions to the license rules somewhere?

[caniszczyk]

The simple thing here is if you come across a website/docs ONLY repo in CNCF and it has the Apache License attached to it, add a LICENSE-DOCS file that's CC-BY 4.0 , that's the fix here imho

[chalin]

Legal matters are hard, and they are even harder when there are multiple sources of (partial) truth, so I'd like to suggest that we avoid duplication/repetition at all costs. IMHO:

• All projects should have a single LICENSE file that contains all the license terms for the repo. For examples see:

  • https://github.com/etcd-io/website/blob/main/LICENSE
  • https://github.com/grpc/grpc.io/blob/main/LICENSE
  • https://github.com/notaryproject/notaryproject.dev/blob/main/LICENSE

• Avoid repeating license info in the repo's README (as is suggested in https://github.com/cncf/techdocs/blob/main/howto/repo-setup.md#license-files) otherwise that creates multiple sources of (partial) truth, potential conflicts, possible misinterpretations etc.

  GitHub already prominently links to the LICENSE file in the repo's About section:

  

  If y'all feel the need to mention the license in the README, then we should do so via a single link using text similar to that used by GitHub (while avoiding to mention the license kind since that might change), something like this:

  View license

/cc @nate-double-u

[chalin]

I just noticed that we have license terms explicitly documented already in https://github.com/cncf/techdocs/blob/main/howto/repo-setup.md:

Unless otherwise specified, documentation for CNCF projects is licensed under CC-BY-4.0.
Code is licensed under Apache 2.0.

I just submitted a proposed single LICENSE file that could be used by all CNCF projects, see cncf/project-template#17. If we can adopt a single (verbatim) license file for all projects, then auditing will become that much easier. As the number of CNCF projects continues to increase, this will scale much better IMHO.

Thoughts?

[chalin]

I guess that the audit should be conducted in light of the exceptions documented in https://github.com/cncf/foundation/tree/master/license-exceptions?

[nate-double-u]

Does clomontior cover this?
@amye, since you're assigned.

[amye]

This is from 2021. I'm not sure this is still relevant, given as the charter says cc-by-4.0 for docs.

[nate-double-u]

Fair enough, closing as stale.