[Cryptech Core] CC-BY license for non code? (Bikeshed warning)

[Rob Austein]

Issue came up regarding licensing of non-code things produced by the
Cryptech project.

Code is covered by existing core decision to go with BSD licensing for
original work, other open source licenses as seems necessary on
case-by-case basis for imported work, and I'm (very much) not trying
to reopen that discussion.

Question is: what about documentation, slide decks, Wiki, blog (if
any), etc (collectively, "text")?

Rough consensus among the sub-group that started discussing this
appears to be Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International ("CC-BY"
for short).  Minority question is whether we can just use BSD for
text, to which majority responds that BSD doesn't really make sense
for text.

Reference for CC-BY:

  http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Summarizing the summary, CC-BY is mostly the same set of rights as BSD
(expressed more verbosely, sigh) with one important addition: it
forbids "effective technical measures" (read: DRM).  There's a bunch
of nitpicky detail (eg, right to put my doc into your database) but
that's the gist.

[Discussion of the evils of DRM declared out of scope here, please.]

Attempting to summarize discussion to date:

The main attractions of BSD are:

1) It's really short, to the point where a normal human being might be
   able to understand it.

2) It's minimally restrictive, which encourages use of our stuff.

The main attractions of CC-BY are:

1) It's the least restrictive variant (-BY) of one of the most
   commonly used text licenses (eg, Wikipedia uses another CC license,
   albeit a more restrictive variant (-BY-AA)).

2) CC-BY is intended to deal with text, international law, etc.

At any rate: I got uncomfortable with this discussion happening with
an ad hoc group that was just providing input to Leif on what needed
to go into the contracts, so I thought it best to drag the issue out
into the open here.

Given opinions already expressed, my guess is that this group will end
up deciding to go with CC-BY.  I am quite sure that we don't need to
invent yet another license.

So, shall text be CC-BY or BSD?

Apologies, both for dragging you all into this and for doing it here
rather than on tech at .  I chose not to do the latter because, in my
experience[*], open public discussion of license issues tends not to
terminate (except perhaps by exhaustion) due to strongly held beliefs.
So while the result and probably the reasoning should be visible,
core@ would end up needing to make the final decision in any case.

[*] Which, sadly, I do have, having once been silly enough spend a
    couple of years as co-chair of the IETF IPR WG.  Which should not
    be taken as implying any special knowledge of licensing issues,
    just as testimony to having spent far too much time trying not to
    strangle a seemingly endless stream of people who knew exactly
    what the One True Answer was, felt were moved to share it with us,
    and denied the legitimacy of all ideas and issues not their own.
    Geeks and lawyers turn out to be one of those synergistic
    combinations where the two taken together are much more awful than
    either group could have managed on their own.