What is the content licence?

[marrus-sh]

I think it would be good to have things be cc by-sa but I don’t see this documented anywhere

[essential-randomness]

Can you explain the cc by-sa license and why you think it would be the appropriate one?

[marrus-sh]

cc by-sa is the Creative Commons Attribution‐ShareAlike license. It requires that derivative materials be redistributed with attribution and under the same license. It is a common license for wiki platforms and is notably used by Wikipedia and Fandom.

Arguments in favour:

why a CC license?

Creative Commons licenses are widely‐recognized and understood. They are not the only kinds of content licenses (for example, there are GNU Documentation licenses) but they are definitely the most popular.

why not NonCommercial?

So that fans can create derivative YouTube videos, websites, resources, etc. and get paid for their work.

why ShareAlike?

Because open access to educational materials is important; this acts as a countermeasure to people refining our content and then putting it behind a paywall. (They still can do that, but if they do, the cc by-sa license allows anyone else to then redistribute it for free.)

There are pros and cons to ShareAlike licensing, but for educational resources I generally think the advantages outweigh the flaws. One counterargument here might be that people working from a tutorial shouldn’t have to license the result cc by-sa, but I think the best way to address that is simply to (additionally) license tutorial code as something more permissive (like MIT). For things which aren’t tutorials or examples, I find it hard to think of an example where someone would create a derivative work and we wouldn’t want to encourage open access, and of course code should carry a separate code‐oriented license anyway.

Alternatives:

just Attribution, no ShareAlike

We can do this, although it leaves the door open for someone turning our content into a $50 textbook that college students now have to buy.

Public Domain

The main thing Attribution gets us is a link back to the wiki so that other people can find us. If we don’t care about ShareAlike or backlinks, then we might as well put content in the public domain.

[marrus-sh]

Another option is to not treat content separately from code and to just use the code license for both. However, my understanding is that we want a very permissive code license (to encourage reuse), but there are reasons to want the content license to be slightly more restrictive (to force people to link back to the wiki, and to preserve open access to materials, as above), so I think there is utility in treating them separately.