[License-discuss] license information improvement project - now with a mockup!

[Luis Villa]

On Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 10:43 AM, Brian Behlendorf <brian at behlendorf.com>wrote:

>
> Nice start!  Quick comments, all in humble opinion which is why I didn't
> make edits directly...
>
>
>  - Any suggestions on the presentation of the information? i.e., is simple
>> bold headings OK? Should we do some fancy table thing instead? Do you
>> like/dislike the ": Information" and ": License Text" I added to the <h1>
>> headers?
>>
>
> I think it should be clearly visually distinct from the text of the
> license itself, say in a different box with a different background color,
> just to make it clear to the first-time reader within a few seconds that
> this metadata is not the text of the license.  The table of contents for
> the license and the text of the license should be more closely visually
> aligned than this metadata.
>

<nod>

This sort of finetuning probably needs to happen on opensource.org (drupal)
rather than wiki.opensource.org (dokuwiki) just because of the differences
in stylesheets, etc., etc.

Speaking of that: is it possible for someone skilled in Drupal to advise
how we could make a "license" template that would handle this
automagically, instead of requiring hand-crafted HTML in each page?


>  - Any comments on what information is/isn't presented? (If you must have
>> extensive discussion of the existing categories or the
>> desirability/possibility of getting more objective information, please
>> change the email subject header :)
>>
>
> A link to both the submission and the notes from the board meeting where
> the license was approved would seem good.
>

The board meeting notes, in every case that I'm aware of, are pretty
uninformative- they simply say approved/not approved. I'm open to
persuasion on this point, I suppose, but I'm inclined to see it as
noise/additional clutter.


> The link to "license category" should go straight to the license category
> page, not to the proliferation committee report.  On that page, each
> license category really should get the description/criteria for that
> category, rather than making the reader read through the report or guess
> from the list of licenses in each category to understand what the
> categories mean.
>

Yes, fair point re the categories page. That said, the description/criteria
for the categories weren't exactly written with these uses in mind. :/ If
someone wanted to take a pass at editing them into something usable for the
purpose, I'd be open to that...


>  - Obviously this information will not all be available for all licenses.
>> In those cases, should we simply omit reference to the information, or
>> should we say something like "Canonical text: the canonical text is no
>> longer available" or "OSI discussion: this license was approved before
>> OSI's current mail archive system, and so the discussion is no longer
>> available"? I think the latter.
>>
>
> The latter, though it would be really good to dig up archives and post
> them, perhaps specifically board meeting minutes where the licenses were
> approved.
>

Yes, I do want to be aggressive about digging up the old records.

Luis
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