Our charter has this confusing language about documentation licensing:
(e) All projects evaluated for inclusion in the CNCF shall be completely licensed under an OSI-approved open source license. If the license for a project included in CNCF is not Apache License, Version 2.0, approval of the Governing Board shall be required.
(f) All documentation will be received and made available by the CNCF under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Thus all project materials must be available under the AL2, but all documentation must be available under CCBY. This language has always been contradictory.
Most projects have taken this to mean that documentation, particularly documentation that is embedded in code repos, may be licensed under either AL2 or CCBY, as circumstances warrant. However, recently, some folks involved in the CNCF ecosystem have taken this to mean that all documentation, even a README, must be licensed CCBY no matter what, even if that requires adding a separate license header to every file or even portions of a file. This interpretation of the policy appears to be based on the mistaken belief that the AL2 cannot legally be used for documentation (something the Apache Project would be very surprised to hear).
And it's stalled us in Contributor Strategy based on "what guidance do we put in the templates regarding license".
My proposal is that the GB clarify that projects must use AL2 for code, and can use either CCBY or AL2 for documentation and content (like websites).
Our charter has this confusing language about documentation licensing:
Thus all project materials must be available under the AL2, but all documentation must be available under CCBY. This language has always been contradictory.
Most projects have taken this to mean that documentation, particularly documentation that is embedded in code repos, may be licensed under either AL2 or CCBY, as circumstances warrant. However, recently, some folks involved in the CNCF ecosystem have taken this to mean that all documentation, even a README, must be licensed CCBY no matter what, even if that requires adding a separate license header to every file or even portions of a file. This interpretation of the policy appears to be based on the mistaken belief that the AL2 cannot legally be used for documentation (something the Apache Project would be very surprised to hear).
And it's stalled us in Contributor Strategy based on "what guidance do we put in the templates regarding license".
My proposal is that the GB clarify that projects must use AL2 for code, and can use either CCBY or AL2 for documentation and content (like websites).