design.drupal.org licences for design files

Posted by Jeff Burnz on July 7, 2011 at 9:34am

Drupal Design sub site will allow uploading of design files for sharing with other users. There are three main sections to the site:

Challenges - where users contribute and collaborate on design problems for drupal.org, drupal projects, drupal core and so on.
Assets - where users can upload and download high quality layered design files such as icons, templates, textures and so on.
Discussion - where users can post comps for discussion, collaboration, feedback and so on.

During the IRC chat we pretty quickly formulated the conclusion that design files should probably be GPL. You can view the chat log here: http://groups.drupal.org/node/159124

This is a tricky situation because there are a number of issues at play here:

At what point does a file become GPL? For example if I upload a flattened comp am I bound to upload and share the layered file? I think not, as this would not (imo) only be unenforceable, I also think it would be an unreasonable demand.
Do we need to protect designers works that are contributed to the "Discussion section"? Assets and Challenge files are there to be shared and can be GPL from the get go, no questions required. The Discussion section is valuable to the sites success, so I don't want to remove it - its the main mechanism for driving community and collaboration.
Potentially the worst issue is design files ending up the Drupal.org project repo's with the wrong or incompatible license. Granted this happens already, design.drupal.org will be perceived as being compatible with everything else in the Drupal group of sites - so users will simply do this without question (I have no doubt this will happen).

So, I can very much see the point of making everything GPL. In my mind the intended purpose of design.drupal.org is open source collaboration and contributions - GPL sits quite well within these purposes. Given that we may strike some resistance to these purposes (for various other reasons), GPL and its implications clearly state an intention. For me these are compelling reasons to make everything GPL.

Comments

Good questions Jeff.I think

Posted by lewisnyman on July 7, 2011 at 10:13am

Good questions Jeff.

I think we should write up a good article outlining GPL and how it differs from other "copyleft" licences like Creative Commons. It would be good for designers coming in to design.drupal.org with no previous experience and it would be good for the community. There are a lot of misunderstandings and misconceptions about GPL and Intellectual Property Law. It would be good to set them straight.

A file becomes GPL when the copyright holder (not always the author) agrees to licence it under GPL. The smart time to do this is when the file is being submitted to the site. I think here we can play the line between the written law and enforcing the law. I don't think we should force users to upload their source along with their jpeg, only because it's a hassle. We should make it clear that anyone can demand it at any time.
We could make licensing "opt out" for discussions. This seems unnecessary though. The whole point of discussions are collaboration, the GPL gives the public a very strong right to modify files and republish them (derivative works)
This would only happen if the licensor never had to right to re-licence the work in the first place. You can't convert a CC Share alike licensed work into GPL unless you are granted this right by the copyright holder.

You know what, that is a damn

Posted by johnalbin on July 7, 2011 at 10:23am

You know what, that is a damn good idea: A simple explanation of how GPL differs from CC licenses would be excellent.

I’ve heard "GPL is crap for images" so many times and yet I can't remember why.

The only time that images are assumed to be GPL is when someone posts them to an issue queue to be added to a repository. There's no assumption of GPL when a user posts images to any other part of the drupal.org site. This is true of the "discussions" section as well. Unless the image owner explicitly states the license, we have to assume the image owner retains all rights to that image.

If designers are bouncing around ideas by altering each other's images, there is a grey area of "derivative artwork". The question is more of who owns what than what is the license at that point. Again, I don't think we should require GPL for this. Just have an FAQ about ownership, derivative works, cooperation, etc for the that section of the site. I think the "worst case scenario" is a designers submitting something and others riffing off of it and the original designer not liking the direction of the design; that's probably going to be the most contentious part of these discussions—the desire to take their ball and leave (i.e. I "own" it, so stop messing with it.)

For the assets part of the site, perhaps we could allow dual licensing? You must include GPL, but you can optionally also include another license like CC. Since all assets would at least be GPL, then we don't have to worry about including any of the assets in Drupal's Git repos.

- John (JohnAlbin)

According the the GNU website

Posted by Jeff Burnz on July 7, 2011 at 10:49am

According the the GNU website there is one CC compatible license - the CC0 Universal Public Domain License.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses
http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode

Actually, we don't need a CC

Posted by johnalbin on July 7, 2011 at 12:28pm

Actually, we don't need a CC compatible license.

We just need to say that, if you upload a file to the assets, you can use:

a single license: the GPL, or
a dual license: the GPL + the license of your choice

“The license of your choice” doesn't have to be compatible with the GPL. The consumer of the image gets to choose which license they wish to follow. Drupal.org users who wish to add the assets to Git need to use GPL in order to add it to their repository.

- John (JohnAlbin)

Right

Posted by lewisnyman on July 7, 2011 at 12:50pm

Right, the base CC means that anyone would be able the re licence the IP as GPL. The full copyright owner can use as many licences as they want. CC0 gives away way more rights then GPL does.

There's no reason why we can't have many different flavours of licences using check boxes. The default could be GPL only.

My question regarding the

Posted by Andy Britton on July 7, 2011 at 10:49am

My question regarding the discussion section is what kind of discussions do people see being carried out. I think once that's been answered some discussion(excuse the punn) can take place around licensing for that section.

If the discussions are for general use that's going to become very sticky if designers are asking for feedback on a client's work and uploadng a PSD for example. Look at dribbble as an example, many designers ask for feedback on 400x300 shots but they aren't uploading the original file, just jpg's or png's so there's the safegaurd.

If the discussions are for Drupal related work, as in things that will end up in the assets section or as a contrib project it becomes less of an issue but still something that needs exploring.

I think I can answer this

Posted by Jeff Burnz on July 7, 2011 at 1:27pm

I think I can answer this reasonably emphatically - first we can't know anything about what people are going to discuss, could the price of fish or the state of the whether, we just can't assume anything.

Second - as long as its well communicated that things are GPL by default then really, people should not be uploading PSD's of client work, they should add jpg, gif or png - indeed in the the Challenges you are limited to these formats. For Discussions you can attach a psd, png, svg, xcf or ai file if you want to - but the main image formats are again jpg, gif and png (the one that people look at in the site).

The png format is one that sticks out because it can be both, so its kinda hard to prevent people uploading some form of layered file.

More info on GPL requirement

Posted by webchick on July 7, 2011 at 2:08pm

This is raising some interesting edge-case discussion. But just to be clear, my concern about licensing is specifically around items in the Assets library, not really Photoshop ping-pong and the like. The asset library is going to be a *drupal.org resource that provides files to module/theme developers and site builders. And people are naturally going to want to put nice icons in their modules, cool background images in their themes, etc.

Once these modules/themes get uploaded to git.drupal.org (which, we hope they all do!), they are required to be GPL-licensed. This has nothing to do with license compatibility—lots of licenses out there are GPL compatible—this is a drupal.org infrastructure policy mandate, because:

a) The infra team doesn't have manpower to play lawyer and investigate the license of every file that we distribute to ensure that it's GPL-compatible.
b) Neither do our users. Forcing a GPL requirement means our users need to understand the implications of exactly one license, and that same license applies to anything they get from Drupal.org.

So the reason I raised this issue is because if a bunch of themes start popping up with CC-licensed stuff in them, they are going to get a warning, and then finally their projects unpublished by the d.o infra team. This happened with folks using the http://www.famfamfam.com/ icons, for example, because they're not GPL, but CC licensed. In response, some GPL icon sets were created like http://drupal.org/project/protocons and http://www.lullabot.com/articles/free-gpl-icons-lullacons-pack-1 and those are perfectly fine.

Giving people the ability to dual-license on upload might be okay. I'd want to check with Larry Garfield first.

Given that a design file

Posted by Jeff Burnz on July 7, 2011 at 2:42pm

Given that a design file could move from a discussion to the Asset Library do you think we should simply not license works in the other parts of the site, and when they hit the Asset Lib they become GPL?

Not sure that would be enough, or the right way to do it.

Posted by timgilmour on July 7, 2011 at 6:12pm

Personally i'd err on the side of caution with explicit license agreements from contributors. Having a posted notice may or may not be enough -- there are cases where it is quite enough, and well ensconced in law (for example, television shoot notices in public places), but not sure this can be considered the same thing. IANAL and all that :)

In the case of shared assets being added to project repos, a disclaimer should go into the archive / dir that contains the file, with full representations as to the copyright status of said files, as well as the above idea of posted notices, and license type vigilance. Really, this question should be referred to an EFF-like org that would be willing to do a bit of pro-bono, or at least referred to those with more experience in this type of thing.

All i know is better safe than sorry aka CYA.

No multi-licensing

Posted by Crell on July 7, 2011 at 10:19pm

Tracking multiple licensing from drupal.org is more work than we want to deal with. If a copyright holder uploads something to d.o, then anyone who gets it from d.o gets it under the GPL. Period. End of story.

If the copyright holder wants to distribute it elsewhere under some other license they are welcome to do so (provided they are the only copyright holder and it's not an inherent derivative work, like a module). We don't need to get involved in that in any way.

Also, if someone posts a file to an issue queue, discussion thread, handbook page, or anywhere else, someone else will at some point grab it and start using it, without considering the license implications. That's a given. It doesn't matter where it's posted, or on what node type, someone will do that. We need to account for that, both to protect the person doing so and the person uploading the file.

OK, so this looks like its

Posted by Jeff Burnz on July 8, 2011 at 1:07am

OK, so this looks like its coming back around to my original premise for d.d.o that everything would end up being GPL. What concerns me somewhat is the CC SA 2 license used for handbook docs - this could be viewed as an inconsistency by designers who are merely participating in discussions.

The handbook is CC SA 2 to

Posted by boris mann on July 12, 2011 at 1:44pm

The handbook is CC SA 2 to make it easy for business contributors to both take from and contribute to documentation -- e.g. adding Non Commercial would mean it's hard for businesses to add stuff if they can't actually benefit from it.

Files, especially images, are harder - it will be easiest to say anything uploaded directly to d.o. is GPL. On the other hand, if people host their own images (e.g. enable the img tag), you could encourage them to CC SA them. I think it's a useful starting point to talk about the world of licensing with respect to design / theming, where the concept of GPL PHP code and copyrighted assets can be discussed (aka premium themes).

I'm thinking this is a design / themer focused learning moment…

This is a decent conclusion.

Posted by lewisnyman on July 12, 2011 at 8:28am

This is a decent conclusion. I think what we need is a non-dry, accessible ~~document~~ article that introduces designers to GPL. Potentially with an assumed background in Creative Commons.

I've started up a doc for us to start throwing down some ideas.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JYBS3EUOnhyyW9n-5ml9NAAOBk06DtdIlavx...

If you don't completely understand the GPL completely, that's great, just throw down some questions. It will give us a good idea of what we have to cover in the article.

Good link?

Posted by yoroy on July 12, 2011 at 10:51am

This may be of use here: http://aliciaweller.com/2009/10/09/clarification-of-wordpress-theme-gpl-...

...

Posted by Jeff Burnz on July 12, 2011 at 12:22pm

@Lewis - not sure we really need to discuss CC in the document, we should really just focus on GPL and what it means for designers - the link in yoroys post is very good, we can lift the essence of that out and build a pretty good FAQ.

I think we should go beyond the legal guff and provide a simple guide on contributing - something like "don't upload your clients PSD files...", stuff like that - common sense things you should be aware of.

I've come up with a blurb for

Posted by Jeff Burnz on July 13, 2011 at 2:17pm

I've come up with a blurb for the site, could we please review this and see that it checks out, and get some feedback etc:

License

Drupal is an Open Source project and community and in the spirit of that openness all design files added to Drupal Design are licensed under the GPL. This license was chosen to ease sharing of design files with Drupal.org projects which require the GPL license.

What does this mean for the community?

When design files are licensed under GPL it means others can use the files, alter the files, and redistribute the files - for example in a theme or module. All altered versions (called “derivative works”) inherit the GPL also.

What does this mean for me?

GPL does not prevent you from selling your work, nor are you forced to distribute your work. You are free to use your work, sell the work, and even attach additional licenses such as a Creative Commons license if you distribute the work from another website.

Great start but we should address this:

Posted by johnvsc on July 13, 2011 at 2:30pm

... Both the GPL and the LGPL makes you distribute the source code with any modification you make (only if that modification is distributed, off course). The difference between them is whether you allow people to link to your code from code using a different license. The LGPL license was designed to allow this.

I would use the GPL, but you should think carefully before releasing software under a free license (although I'm totally in favor of this), because ones it's done, you can't go back. I've heard a few stories of companies trying to do this (don't remember exactly their names) and it didn't go well for them.
~ http://stackoverflow.com/questions/243196/what-is-the-difference-between...

So, I would include to make sure that if they did distribute artwork under a restrictive CC license, then their offering must add alot more value so that there is a clear distinction down the road ... esp for derivatives :)

Other than that, I think this looks good :)