[ocaml-infra] ocaml.org licensing

[Christophe Troestler]

On Thu, 27 Feb 2014 10:39:38 +0000, Anil Madhavapeddy wrote:
> 
> On 27 Feb 2014, at 10:35, Fabrice Le Fessant <Fabrice.Le_fessant at inria.fr> wrote:
> 
> > Ok, so if we only focus on licensing, I would like to have licenses
> > attached to directories in the GIT directory, i.e. make it easy to
> > know which file is under which license. It is especially important for
> > point (D): whoever wants to customize its own version of the website
> > (for example, for a version of the website translated to another
> > language), but with a different design (with flags, for example :-) ),
> > should know immediatly the parts that shouldn't be used on the new
> > website, and have to be replaced.
> 
> I agree with this.  Although it makes the source files uglier, I also
> prefer having an explicit license per-file, since this eases copying
> individual source modules into other projects.  (This doesn't apply to
> documentation, just source code).

Maybe we can even add the license as a couple of lines to the top of
each file (so it is immediately clear what it is if one presses the
"edit" button).  For example, for .md files, this could be

<!-- Content is under CC BY-SA 4.0, Code examples under UNLICENSE.
     See LICENSE.md for more details. -->

"headache" could do most of the work for us.

> > Otherwise, I think we (OCamlPro) are good with the current licensing policy.
> 
> Great!

Glad that we are moving forward!

> >> The question of *who* the contributors are is very
> >> straightforward as we have git logs of all activity [1].  You can
> >> even see this per page if you wish [2].
> > 
> > I think contributors deserve a better place on the website than being
> > in a GIT log. Having a credit page listing all the contributors would
> > be enough. It would be easy for anybody that contributes to add his
> > own name to that page in the same pull-request as the content being
> > pushed.
> 
> This will get out of date pretty fast, and also results in a lot of merge
> conflicts if there are multiple outstanding requests.  I recommend just
> autogenerating it using Thomas' Git implementation 
> (http://github.com/samoht/ocaml-git).

We also have not to forget the people¹ who contributed to the
tutorials and who do not appear in the Git log.  Also note that some
people appear several times with different names and some other use
abbreviations that may not be clear (e.g., "MM", "lehy", "mrnt0810").
For the git log, as long as the contribution is good, I do not care
much but for an acknowledgment page, it may look funny.

Best,
C.

¹ http://ocaml.org/learn/tutorials/acknowledgements.html