[Puppet Users] Re: Copyright on published recipies

Evan Hisey
2008-06-30T14:33:58Z

> We need to modify our copyright statements, clearly; I just
haven''t
> been paying attention to that bit.
>
> Reductive Labs will never claim copyright or ownership of anyone
> else''s work, either contributions to Puppet or postings on the
wiki.
>
> I expect that a BSD-style license makes more sense for the manifests,
> rather than following Puppet''s GPL, but I don''t know how
that meshes
> with the non-executable content (which would need something more like
> a Creative Commons license, I think).
>
GFD was made to handle non-code stuff so that could work. The CC
licenses get tricky in a hurry, to many ways to put them together. I
see no particular reasons that the gpl or BSD would not cover a
manifest or recipe, though without need for a documents license. The
recipes are effectively part of the  run time code of puppet and
everything needed to make recipe work is part of that "code"

>> Because the general intent is that you could mix and match modules
>> from
>> different sources in your site''s local manfiest, I think as a
best
>> practice ALL files in a collection should explicitly include at
>> minimum
>> a copyright notice (such as Copyright 2008 Ryan Mcbride) and a
>> statement
>> of copyright permission stating which license it is distributed under.
>
> I agree with this.  I''ve tried to make contributions to projects
where
> the license hadn''t been tracked closely (Ganglia, in particular)
and I
> couldn''t publish the work in the end because I didn''t
know what
> license I should use.

Fortunately this problem should not affect people attempting to _use_
the recipes. Only those publishing complete manifests or large recipe
groupings are affected. Perhaps a list of recommend recipe license on
the wiki recipe page would be a could idea for those interested in
publishing?

Evan