License the RFCs repo under the CC-BY 4.0 license

internals policy
5

Thanks again for the clarification @ubsan.

Before we go forward with this I would like to explicitly lay out the plan. This is an important matter, and it’s important that it be communicated clearly.

Here are some of the things that I expect, and the issues that need to be managed.

  • The message to contributors should be clear and detailed, explaining what is happening, why it is happening, what license is being chosen, what that license means in lay terms and why that license is being chosen.
  • It should contain precise instructions to contributors for how they should indicate their assent to the license change. For example, if the process is going to involve commenting on a PR, it should say so, and it should provide the exact text they should paste into the thread so that there is no ambiguity. An example might be “I agree to license all my prior contributions to the rust-lang/rfcs repository under the terms of the CC-BY-4.0 license.”
  • How will we deal with the outstanding PRs and the PRs that arrive between the time that we begin the relicensing process and complete it? We can’t assume that all existing PRs agree to the new terms. This is particularly tricky with the RFCs repo because there are so many in flight. We cannot simply get permission for past contributions, update the license then assume all authors of existing PRs agree to the new license. Offhand I am not sure the best way to deal with this, but there must be a clear sequence of events that ensures that all contributors have assented to the license terms, and it needs to be spelled out ahead of time.
  • If the relicensing process involves commenting on PRs then we must be concerned with the mutability and impermanence of GitHub comments. An author can seemingly retract their consent by deleting their comment. How will we mitigate this risk?
  • Not all contributors will agree to new terms. How will we handle these cases?

I’m happy to offer suggestions on how to deal with any of these issues, and find people who can lend an expert opinion, but I have not thought deeply about them just yet.

Please describe in detail the process here, and write, in this thread, the text of any communication you will send so that others can review.

Here are some links related to previous relicensing efforts that you can reference, though there may be aspects that we can or should do differently:

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