License

[pfink]

We should set a license here soon as long as the list of people we have to get approval from stays short. I'd suggest BY-NC-SA. Before, we probably have to get rid of the images that can't be published under such license.

[kaikreuzer]

Why not use EPL as well so that it would be in line with all other repos (including docs)?

[ghys]

Plus, there is probably more code than documentation content in this repo...

[pfink]

My thought was that the openHAB website represents kind of the identity of the (non-profit) openHAB community (and foundation) and that we would not want to give that free for commercial use. My focus was especially also on the blog posts which in the future may also contain creative work (maybe even art) and journalistic articles. Not sure if every author would like it if their articles could be copied and sold as (or with) a commercial product without any need of permission (especially for authors with commercial background this could may be problematic). That's why software licenses are not quite common for journalistic or creative work. Using EPL would mean, any company and any newspaper/magazine could copy everything without even having to put a link back to our website. Another option would be BY-SA which does allow commercial use, but requires people who copy & adopt at least to put a link to the original source.

That were my thoughts, but I'm not stuck to them. If you prefer EPL, that's also fine for me.

[pfink]

@kaikreuzer @ghys: Would be cool if we could take a decision here soon :)

[kaikreuzer]

@pfink Your point are valid and I don't have any strong opinion. Not sure though, how well the CC licenses fit to code in this repo. Maybe one could have a CC license for the blogs folder and EPL for the rest?
As @ghys is the main maintainer of this repo, I would like to hear his preferences :-)

[ghys]

IANAL and as far as my work is concerned (most code in this repo and a blog article) I too am not partial to either license, a few observations:

• I'd like to go back on my statement above about this repo being "mostly code", apart from the blog (as you mentioned), there is also snapshots of docs from previous releases in .vuepress/public/v2.x,
• Most of the content at least in the "docs" & "addons" section comes from the openhab-docs, ESH and various README.md and other files in (as of now) EPL-licensed repos, so I'm not sure it can be relicensed without permission from the original authors;
• I wouldn't mind the blog articles by licensed under CC-BY-SA while the rest remains under the EPL, since it does make much more sense for written content - maybe it can be stated as such ("This content is made available under the CC-BY-SA license") in the footer or on the imprint page (for blog articles only);
• About images - I was careful for a number of them to make sure they were CC0 or in the public domain, but some others (especially those migrated from the old website) I don't really know where they come from. As for logos (add-ons, hardware/OSes and social networks) I believe they fall under fair use, again maybe with a mention somewhere ("logos are trademarks of their respective owners").

[pfink]

I wouldn't mind the blog articles by licensed under CC-BY-SA while the rest remains under the EPL, since it does make much more sense for written content - maybe it can be stated as such ("This content is made available under the CC-BY-SA license") in the footer or on the imprint page (for blog articles only);

As we all agree that code and content can/should be licensed differently, I think it would make sense to decouple website content and website code as a whole (maintain it in seperate repositories). Within the current repo, files are already decoupled very well. I took a look at the last changes and they either affected code-only or content-only files, but never both at the same time. So maybe it just does not belong together?

[florian-h05]

Bringing this up again for discussion as we still have no license ... I think the proposal to put the repo in general under EPL, but the blog content under BY-NC-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) sounds reasonable.
We already have repos with "split" licensing, e.g. openhab-docs, which is EPL, but has a separate LICENSE for the add-on logos: https://github.com/openhab/openhab-docs/blob/main/images/addons/LICENSE