License recommendation for specs

[Egmont Koblinger]

Hello,

I'm new on this list. I've been working on a specification for a few months
that will kindly be hosted on FDO.

Pretty much the only remaining step is to pick a license for my work.

I've seen some relevant discussions on this mailing list between March-May
2018. What I haven't seen, though, is some evaluation of the potential
licenses and guidelines to pick one, nor the final choices you went for.

I tried to read and interpret some of the popular licenses. The lack of
good web search matches, and in particular [1] and [2] suggest to me that
there isn't any designed or well suited for specifications.

My first big dilemma: I'm wondering what does "free" mean in the context of
specifications, and what does FDO want it to mean on its site and in its
overall vision.

My instincts tell me that a "free specification" should be one that
everybody is free to implement, without imposing restrictions on the
implementation. That is: okay to implement in a closed source commercial
application. As per [1], it's unclear whether an implementation of a
specification counts as "derived work" or not, and thus whether CC BY-SA
allows this.

Debian's guideline of being "free" instead seems to focus on the
modification and distribution of the material in question instead. E.g.
they only consider GFDL free if it doesn't have an invariant section. For a
piece of software or documentation, Debian's is a reasonable approach. For
specifications I don't think so. And this leads to my second big dilemma.

For specifications, even for "free" ones, I think it's outright undesirable
to create and distribute modified work. In order to avoid incompatible
specifications competing against each other, resulting in quite a mess and
poor interoperability between implementations, contributors should be
pushed to improve the original specification whenever feasible (e.g. the
project is maintained actively), or perhaps come up with extensions as
separate new projects that potentially refer to the original one, but
should not create forks and slightly altered variants (especially in
backwards incompatible ways) of the original.

Not sure if this restriction belongs to the license, though, or should sort
itself out by other means, e.g. by the original work having some "respect"
and the community refusing to go with forks.

Also note that even if the license chosen for a specification disallows the
creation of modified work, it should probably still be allowed if done with
the explicit intent of sending suggested modifications back to mainstream.
(If I understand correctly, CC BY-ND doesn't allow the creation of publicly
visible merge request?)

I would not like to release my work to the public domain / CC0 or so.
Ideally I wouldn't want others to distribute my work (the specification
itself, or parts of it) commercially, so I'm not keen on CC BY either. And,
since I'm not a laywer, I wouldn't want to come up with something custom.

Something that occurred to me as a little bit of custom, though, is CC
BY-SA clarifying that implementing in commercial apps is okay. Since I'm
not confident enough to amend the CC license by a sentence, technically I'm
thinking of addressing it by dual-licensing my work under CC BY-SA and a
self-written sentence along the lines of "okay to implement anywhere, all
other rights reserved". Users would need to pick one of these two,
contributors would need accept this OR-combination of them. This is the
approach I like the most so far, but I'm not sure if it makes sense to you
guys too, or if maybe you see a red flag.

Or, what happens if I just release without any licensing? What are the
downsides of that approach? Why is it important or encouraged to have a
license? Aren't the "legal defaults" of any published work without a
license good enough, and perhaps closer to what I imagine than any of these
existing license texts? Note that most of the standards I used during my
work, e.g. ECMA ones, come without a license.

What do you guys think of these? Which licenses did you consider? Which
ones do you or do you not recommend? Which one did you end up choosing for
specifications, and what were the main reasons behind your decisions?

Thanks a lot,

egmont
(gnome-terminal/vte developer)

[1] https://lu.is/blog/2008/03/27/brief-cc-licensed-specification-rant/
[2]
https://creativecommons.org/2008/03/29/what-good-is-a-cc-licensed-specification/
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