OSS licences vs. ToS: grants of rights about site-policy

[mirabilos]

I’ve reviewed the §D.3—§D.6 of the current ToS (“Effective date: October 11, 2017”), and I double-checked with GNU GPLv1 and GPLv2, and I believe that my concerns are now addressed. (Sorry for taking so long.) Thanks!

[bluemazzoo]

Hi @mirabilos, thanks for your feedback! Since you have a few different concerns within this issue, we ask that you split them up so that each issue contains a single problem that you'd like to address. While the issues may be related, having multiple concerns in a single issue will make focused discussions more difficult to hold, and may result in issues remaining open longer than is necessary. Thanks!

[mirabilos]

Hi @mirabilos, thanks for your feedback! Since you have a few different concerns within this issue, we ask that you split them up so that each issue contains a single problem that you'd like to address.

As far as I can tell, I already split the issues I have along a logical boundary: all changes in either issue are a direct result of one specific executive decision (one about stating that each OSS licence already suffices, the other about dropping the attribution waiver). I'll reread to see whether I can split something off, though.

[nsqe]

Hi, @mirabilos,

Thank you so much for these well thought-out comments. We've given them a lot of thought since you proposed them, and we believe our new ToS draft sufficiently addresses these issues. However, we're going to leave these issues open, so if other users have comments, we'd like to see them.

We don't want to put an explicit list of FOSS licenses in the Terms of Service, because that list can be limiting in the event that new licenses come out or that projects use unique, one-off licenses (which does happen). Instead, we have explained the minimal requirements we need — and we've made them as limited as we possibly could — and we've asked users to make sure that the content they post is compliant.

It isn't appropriate for us to give legal advice, such as by making a blanket statement about any single open source license and how it interacts with our Terms of Service agreement. Open source licenses can be complex and nuanced. We can only do our best to make our Terms as clear as possible, so it's easy for our users to understand what we need.

That said, a lot of your suggestions are really good, they would just work better for a FAQ or an explanatory article than for a Terms of Service agreement, because we're trying to keep it as short and easy to read as possible. Adding more text that isn't part of the legal contract doesn't help to strengthen the agreement.

We really do appreciate all of the feedback you've given us. It's so important to us to make sure that our Terms don't conflict with the licenses that control content on our site. We're interested in any other comments our community has on this topic.

[mirabilos]

I’ve rechecked the issue against the latest draft and added a pull request with suggested language to make the goal clear (also to protect against suggestions like those from #37 and #38 which invite an even less compatible-with-OSS-projects licence grant).

[nsqe]

Hey, @mirabilos,

I'm coming back to this, and I'm commenting here instead of the pull requests, but I've read the discussion in #52 extensively, and the discussion @wking built off of it in #54.

What I'm coming back to is essentially what I said in #7 (comment): we just can't put a list of FOSS licenses in the Terms of Service.

However, we think it would be absolutely reasonable for us to write a guideline to how various major open source licenses interact with the GitHub Terms of Service, and put that in our Help documentation. We can't do that before the current comment period is over, but we have added it to our roadmap. We hope to address not only what happens if a user uploads content with particular license requirements, but also what happens if someone else forks the content (or adapts it).

We hope this should answer any lingering questions about how our license grant affects content posted with open source licenses...and of course, we'll want feedback on it once we're done!