Licensing guidelines

Our policy on licensing projects and works at Recap Time Squad

You have a project to ship or even get adopted under the Recap Time Squad organization, and have reviewed the release policy and checklist, alongside being ready to take the responsibility of an open-source maintainer. One of the requirements is to have a LICENSE file in your repository/project.

This document answers "which license?"

In a nutshell

Our licensing policy for open-source projects is simple: as long as it is OSI-approved, can be maintained in the long term, and does not involve using the "fair source"/open-core model of licensing (unless cleared by the HCB team for dual-licensing or after refactoring), we can allow it to exist within our organization.

Note that Hack Club, as our fiscal sponsor per the fiscal sponsorship agreement, will hold the projects' copyrights on our behalf, so be mindful of the license you'll pick.

TL;DR:

• Code (including core projects and anything involving backends/API): MPL or AGPL, also Apache and/or MIT work too

• Documentation, media, and other non-software: CC-BY-SA-4.0 (or the regular CC-BY-4.0)

• Snippets, data, boilerplate: MIT might work, but we recommend sticking with CC0

• Something else, special considerations, and edge cases: file a meta issue and/or contact the HCB team

Software

Default: MPL-2.0 or AGPL for substantial projects, although MIT and Apache can also be used. Dual-licensing between different OSI-approved licenses is discouraged.

Technically, any OSI-approved licenses alongside the aforementioned defaults should work for new or to-be-adopted projects at Recap Time Squad. But since some projects involve building backend services or are considered major projects, we use Mozilla Public License v2 (MPL-2.0) and/or Affero General Public License (AGPL-3.0). In some cases, like API libraries and tooling, we can use Apache or even MIT.

Note that while you can dual-license between them, it is often not recommended to do so due to possible legal headaches, especially for corporate users.

If you need to use another license not mentioned here (either OSI-approved or otherwise), let's talk: TBD

Documentation and media files

Default: CC-BY-SA-4.0 (CC-BY-4.0 also works)

Occasionally, we publish substantial non-software content (e.g., documentation, media) that we want to give others permission to copy, modify, and distribute if they give us credit and don't use our trademarks, but they need to use the same license. That's what CC-BY-SA-4.0 is for. It works similarly to the GPL (just one-way compatibility if it's happened to be used on software works) as used on Wikimedia projects (including Wikipedia) and MIT for the plain CC-BY-4.0, but is designed for non-software works (e.g., license notice can be provided with a link rather than including a copy of the license text).

If you need to use a more restrictive Creative Commons license (e.g., and ) or another non-CC license (including dedicating to the public domain via CC0, see next section), let's talk: TBD

Why the international licenses (unported/generic in v3 and below)?

(see https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/6553/21717 and https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/489/21717 for context)

While we can opt to use the United States port/version of the Creative Commons licenses since our fiscal sponsor is US-based,

Other non-software works

Default: CC0-1.0, but any CC or non-CC license should work (just ask)

It's up to you to pick a suitable license for other non-software works, other than the good old CC licenses, but if you don't want to worry about that, dedicating it to the public domain through the CC0 license can be a great option.

CC0-1.0 waives all copyright restrictions but reserves trademark and patent rights, making it an easy, unconditional license for Recap Time Squad material when:

• burden to the user of maintaining copyright notices forever is large relative to the incremental value of using licensed material, and

• there is no demonstrable business value from mandating the maintenance of copyright notices

To use the CC0 license:

• If you are going to make the whole project CC0 licensed, copy the legal code from Choose A License website or from Creative Commons themselves and paste it in the LICENSE file at the root directory.

• In the case of particular files or parts of content (e.g., code snippets in documentation) that should be released under CC0-1.0, note this precisely in the repository's README and at the top of the content in question (via code comments, etc.).

• If the released material is rendered or published, e.g., as or in web pages, it can also be useful to include a CC-BY-4.0 notice there, e.g., "This documentation is released under CC-BY-4.0", with a link to https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ or the project README's licenses section, depending on the complexity of the situation.

• Note that there are zero copyright license requirements when using material released under CC0-1.0, but it is usually best practice to maintain license notices and attribution anyway, as you would for MIT and CC-BY software and non-software above.

Non-Recap Time Squad projects

Recap Time Squad projects utilize the Linux DCO as our contributor license agreement for simplified compliance for contributors at the expense of requiring a referendum on license changes with all contributors and rewriting for those who disagree. While not the focus of this document, worth a mention:

• If we have to maintain a fork of an open-source license for our use (or even contributing patches as a Recap Time Squad Crew member), simply follow the upstream license to lessen the legal burden.

• If a project requires signing the CLA before contributing patches on behalf of the team (either for all contributions or on Enterprise Edition/non-OSS parts)

Credits

Portions of this policy are adapted from the licensing guidelines document at GitHub's OSPO (Open Source Office) repository.