Draft: License policy for contributors

[Alan Coopersmith]

Adam Jackson wrote:
> I don't know what our documentation licensing stance is.  MIT would keep
> things simple, but I don't know if it's appropriate for docs.

Many of the docs are under MIT already - for documentation of the code,
keeping under the same license seems best.   For specifications/standards
type documents, I've wondered before if there's a suitable variant that
allows free re-use in any context other than claiming a modified version
is the official standard (similar to Apache's "If you change it, you must
rename it" clause) - perhaps Creative Commons 3.0-Attribution ?

> The X.Org Foundation is dedicated to improving the open source reference
> implementation of the X Window System for the benefit of all.  To this
> end, code and documentation contributions are required to be under a
> suitably permissive license.  The preferred code license is the MIT
> license; the canonical form of the MIT license is here: [ insert link to
> version with generic "THE AUTHORS" rather than explicit author names ].

Mostly for avoiding the proliferation of further license variants, our
lawyers seem to prefer the form at:
	http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php

which seems to be a reasonable, generic variant, without the documentation
clauses that Jim raised as an issue for OLPC a while ago.

Thanks for finally writing this down - I've been waiting to approach our
lawyers about relicensing Sun's contributions to a standard format until
we actually decided what the preferred standard license notice was.

-- 
	-Alan Coopersmith-           alan.coopersmith at sun.com
	 Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering