Blog license poll : results

The survey conducted in the last weeks resulted in establishing clear licensing rules on community blogs, on this portal. Read on.

Results

Here are the aggregated results of the survey :

1. Should each author be proposed to pick the license he prefers for every of his blog post ?

• [70%] Yes
• [30%] No

2. If yes, what are the licenses an author should be able to choose from ? [multiple choice]

• [70%] GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html
• [83%] One of the Creative Commons licenses http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses

3. If you chose one of the CC licenses above, please precise which one.

• [26%] All
• [21%] CC by-nc-sa ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0 )
• [31%] CC by-sa ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0 )
• [5%] CC by-nd ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0 )
• [5%] CC by-nc ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0 )
• [10%] CC by ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0 )

4. Which license should be the default license ?

• [37%] GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html
• [59%] One of the Creative Commons licenses http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses
• [4%] Other

5. If you chose one of the CC licenses above, please precise which one

• [58%] CC by-sa ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0 )
• [14%] CC by-nc-sa ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0 )
• [14%] CC by-nd ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0 )
• [14%] CC by ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0 )

6. You may have additional remarks

• "No remarks, that's a very good initiative !"
• "Ideally, one could choose the license for each post. Thanks for this poll!"
• "By making us work to choose anything but FDL, you are in effect proposing the FDL. Which is fine. Maybe all this licensing is necessary and beneficial. It seems generally a waste of time. Here is to you, the lawyers, who cannot survive without such malarkey."
• "A viral license as a default one is preferable. It disallow to enclose the documentation, and therefor, help to spread out informations about ezpublish to a broader audience."

Conclusions

The conclusions of this seem to be :

1. A user should be able to pick a license for each of this posts
2. The proposed licences should be GNU FDL and all CCs
3. The default license, if the author omits specifying it, should be CC by-sa ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0 )

Implementation

Waiting for an all-in-one license-handling datatype to be added to the "Blog post" content class, guidelines on how to apply a license to one's blog posts are described here : http://share.ez.no/about/etiquette-blogging-and-usage-guidelines#blog-licenses

Thanks for having been part of the survey, this helped us clarify the terms on blogging on the eZ Community portal. I am delighted to see that this platform is regularly used by many of you to communicate with the rest of the community. I think this is a channel of choice to share, back and forth, on all topics around eZ Publish.

Happy blogging, and happy licensing !