On Wed, Sep 3, 2014 at 4:11 PM, Gervase Markham <[email protected]> wrote: > Ted Mielczarek writes: > "Test files are unique in that they're not part of what we ship, but > also can be valuable to outside parties (other browser developers, > standards organizations). They're usually standalone and simple enough > that nobody ought to care what the license is, so using public domain > feels like a good fit. Having them default to public domain means that > if someone wants to upstream them to a standards org, or share them with > another browser vendor they don't need to worry about the licensing."
I support this reasoning and support a policy that puts tests we write under CC0. I think we should still permit importing tests that are more restrictively licensed from elsewhere and allow people who write tests as work-for-hire for the Mozilla Group to contribute to more restrictively licensed upstream test repos under the licenses of those repos. (Maybe the previous sentence is obvious, but I think it's worth saying explicitly.) > Practically speaking, we would set an implementation date after which > this policy would come into effect. Tests with an explicit licensing > declaration would continue to be bound by that. We would encourage but > not require people to use the CCO declaration. But many tests are and > will continue to not have an explicit license. If someone wanted to know > the license of an unlicensed test, they could look at its checkin date. I think it would make sense for tests that have been written as work-for-hire to the Mozilla Group or have otherwise had their copyright transferred to the Mozilla Foundation prior to the policy change date to be relicensed by the Mozilla Foundation under CC0. That way, if a test predated the policy change but the logs showed it was authored by an Mozilla employee or contractor, you could treat it as CC0 without further bureaucracy. -- Henri Sivonen [email protected] https://hsivonen.fi/ _______________________________________________ legal mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/legal
