@fjanss has posed an interesting problem: is it OK to license content on Edgeryders with a CC-BY-SA license, rather than the default CC-BY license specified by the Legals page?
Tentative answer (my own, would be interested in what others think):
- There are no ideological problems, of course. CC-BY-SA meets the criteria of the Open Definition (Share Alike is an "Acceptable Condition" to users' rights under section 2.2.3); but even if it did not, it makes sense that each person sets the license of her own project. CC-BY was chosen when Edgeryders was still a Council of Europe project as an even more open license. At the time, we could not envision a spinoff and non-CoE projects riding on the platform.
- In fact, it would be simple to add a "License" field to nodes of type project. This is the way GitHub has it: upon creating a repository, you are asked for a license (fun fact: the authors of about 80% of repositories still could not be bothered to choose one). We would not even have to alter the Legals page, that says "Expect where otherwise specified..."
- However, this does limit interoperability of within-Edgeryders content. This is only a problem to the extent that we aspire to release open data (see the data strategy for more on this), and this way contribute to the commons. In practice, at the moment (spring 2015) there is only one open data project sitting on top of Edgeryders, and it concerns not content, but data about content. It is a small FLOSS project called Edgesense, a real-time network analysis of the Edgeryders conversation (live dashboard provisional link – code). If you go to the dashboard, you will see a small "download" icon top right: that generates a GEXF graph file. In the final version (almost there now!) this file will be documented and licensed according to the Open Knowledge Foundation's Data Package convention, and pseudonymized. If we had posts and comments licensed under CC-BY-SA or any other license, the license of the secondary data (the graph file, in this case) would break down.
- I am seeing three possible solutions to this. One (easiest): restrict the license of the secondary data (graph file) to the most restrictive license used on the primary data (posts and comments). To be able to do open data, the license cannot be any more restrictive than CC-BY-SA. So, in practice, the choice of license on ER would be restricted to CC0, CC-BY, CC0-SA and CC-BY-SA. Two (technically easy, legally clunky): provide for different licenses on the primary data, but ask anyone on Edgeryders to consent to keep secondary data open. Three: limit processability of primary data to those with open licenses (technically complex, legally clean).
@Matthias, are there any flaws in the above?