Licenses dammed Licenses

Just wanted to share a few mistakes I made regarding licensing of Flask and some general suggestions of how to handle it. Also I would like to explain a problem I have with open source licenses in general and if you have some suggestions. Disclaimer: IANAL and what I write down there might be completely wrong. If you know better, please let me know. (And I mean it. Granted, I hate licensing, but I also depend on them so I want to have a good understanding of what the heck I'm actually doing by licensing my stuff)

Closed Open I love Open Source, I really do. All my code is licenses under the very generous BSD license which comes with barely any strings attached: do what you want, keep the copyright around, do not use my name to endorse derived products. And I am totally fine with that. But that is my take on code alone. When it comes to artwork and design I would love to use a less open license. Why? Let's take the Flask documentation as an example. This documentation has a nice and simple stylesheet and is still unique enough that one could recognize Flask or Flask related projects from it. So I would love (but can't) limit that license to something like: use this only for Flask related projects or modify it enough to be visually different. Now of course that is a fishy description, but this could be fixed. The problem however is that this is no longer an open source license (which I would not have any problems with). After all that also forces Linux distributions like Debian to ship a modified version of my project with a different style for the documentation because they have to reject such packages or put it into the non-free section. Both things I would love to avoid, so I back-paddled on my licensing plans and put the themes under the BSD license with friendly reminder now. But when I was changing the license an interesting thing came up: could it be that the old theme was partially unlicensed? Now one stylesheet was already BSD licensed, that was not a problem, the template files and everything else did not have a license header nor was a LICENSE file in place. The way Flask used that style was with a git submodule. Interestingly this was not present in the source distribution of Flask. So unless Debian made any changes, the docs would not build out of the box on a Debian system anyway which brought back my idea for going the non-free path with docs. But that is now past in any case, so let's move on. But the more interesting question here is what license that thing is under now. I am pretty sure one could argue that the original documentation was not licensed, thus closed source and all Flask extensions I did not write were violating the license (which was never the intention because the documentation strongly recommends the Flask documentation themes).

Licensing Documentation Licenses from a source POV are already crazy, but when it comes to documentation texts, images and everything else involved in a modern application or even software library the whole thing becomes way more complex. Like many others I so far licensed my code under the BSD license and I did that by adding a quick licensing header to all files and adding a LICENSE file with the license text. The license text was more or less the original three-clause BSD license text with "University of Berkley" replaced by "Copyright Holder" and a line that describes who the copyright holder is/are so that copy/pasting that license gets easier. With Flask I now made a change to that license so that it not only mentions source and binaries, but also the documentation explicitly (read the new license). From a legal point of view it should still be the same as before, but now explicitly mentions the documentation. That documentation should get their own license is something I did not come up with, other people did that before me. Which is why there exists a list of documentation licenses: GNU Free Documentation License, FreeBSD Documentation License, the Creative Commons Licenses and many more. Now my first plan was to adapt the FreeBSD Documentation License because it is very close to the BSD license and should not cause any troubles switching to without having to ask all the persons who provided patches. Though a licensing change is a licensing change and even if just the wording changed I would not pull this off without sending out mails first. But before I even came to that, I noticed that this would not work out at all. Because if that is assumed to be a different license than the BSD license used previously the final built documentation would be affected by both the BSD and now the FreeBSD documentation license. Why that? Because the sourcecode itself is still under the BSD license and with that the docstrings in there which are pulled directly into the final documentation. While one could argue in many programming languages that the comments are under a different license, this does not work out well in Python where the docstrings are available at runtime. They are clearly part of the program. My final change was to take the previous BSD license and explicitly add "and documentation" to everything that previously just listed "source" and "binary" form. I am quite confident that this is overkill but still serves the purpose. To be honest I doubt anyone would ever want to sue anyone based on ambiguous documentation licenses, but for me the whole point of a license is to be something I can defend my project on. And as such I want to have a clear understanding for myself what exactly is under which license. If someone would have asked me a week ago under that license my documentation was, I would have answered with BSD. If then that person would have asked me where this was written down I would have had a harder time explaining that "source" also means restructured text and "binary" also means HTML.

Logos and Design Now this is where I am totally lost. When I was asking on Twitter what license to pick for a project logo, people answered with the creative commons attribute non-derivative 3.0 license (hereby named CC-ND-3.0). Now I actually did license that logo under that license and even shipped it with the documentation and the Flask tarball, and it also ended up in Debian. The interesting part is that the website clearly mentioned the license as CC-ND-3.0. I just violated my own license and from my understanding of the copyright law, what I released should be considered CC-ND-3.0 for the logo because I would not be legally allowed to license that as BSD. This is pretty weird because as a copyright holder I can release that thing under anything but you could argue that because the LICENSE file was not in the same folder as the logo and the logo was just copied there, it not automatically becomes BSD licensed. That's like if I would copy the Debian logo into my project it does not become BSD licensed, I just made a license violation by not adding the license. Again, in the Debian can I'm not the copyright holder, but I could imagine that if that would have to be defended in court, the same logic would apply. Either way, the interesting part here is that the CC-ND-3.0 license is not accepted in Debian because it is not a free license. So in theory if my package would be a license violation and I correct this license violation by revoking all current releases, and re-release those packages with a license text for CC-ND-3.0 Debian would have to update all their tarballs to exclude the logo from it. It's fun to see how such small differences can cause such an amount of troubles for all parties involved. So I decided not to be a dick and adapt a very simple license for the logo (read license text) that is formed after the Debian free logo license. It also has a BSD-ish clause regarding endorsements by Flask authors and recommends linking to the Flask project website. From what I understand, old release are now okay in compliance with the new license which also works retroactively so Debian should be in the clear. However the source version of the logo (the SVG file) still has to come with the license text which never was part of the distribution tarballs.